The fuel fight

I may be driving a hybrid pickup truck (Chevrolet’s full-sized Silverado extended cab), but I still had to shell out $30 to fill the tank three-quarters of the way up after a fast run to Cape Cod and back.

The Silverado is the pride of GM’s fuel-economy efforts to date, but it’s not a hybrid in the same sense that Honda’s Civic and Toyota’s Prius are. In fact, because this is a big truck and it’s powered by a 5.3-liter V-8, the best it can do is 18 miles per gallon in the city, 21 on the highway.

I was thinking about this as the 2005 federal fuel-economy ratings were released. See them for yourself at www.fueleconomy.gov. As always, the ratings make fascinating reading, both because of what they say and what they don’t.

The most fuel-efficient SUV is, no surprise, the hybrid Ford Escape (36 city/31 highway). Hybrids are also winners in the two-seater category (the Honda Insight, 61/66), the compact car segment (Honda Civic, 45/51 with a manual) and mid-sized cars (Toyota’s Prius, 60/51).

But there are also some very fuel-efficient non-hybrids, like the subcompact-class-winning Mini Cooper, which in manual form yields 28/36 mpg. The Chevrolet Malibu Maxx is also a winner, in large cars, at 22/30.

The winning minivan is the Honda Odyssey (19/25 in two-wheel-drive guise), and the winning pickup the Ford Ranger 2WD (24/29 with a manual. It’s the same vehicle as the Mazda B2300).

The Sierra Club has pointed out, quite rightly, that some very big culprits are let off scot-free in the federal list. The Hummer H2 and the Ford Excursion, for instance, are not counted because they exceed the 8,500-pound weight limit.

With them out of the running, the villains appear to be such rarefied specialty vehicles as the Lamborghini L-147, the Maserati Coupe and Gransport, the Bentley Continental GT and Arnage and the Mercedes G55 AMG. There’s so few of these things on the road that they’re not causing a lot of smog. It’s criminal that the Aston Martin DB9 Volante gets 11 miles per gallon around town, but these cars are far more plentiful as dorm posters than real tailpipe emitters.

I think the real news is in the list of subcompact and compact cars, where there are some really good family cars that never get any attention from the enthusiast magazines. How about considering these fuel-efficient contenders when going out car shopping: Subaru Impreza, Dodge Neon, Ford Focus, Honda Civic, Infiniti G35, Mazda3, Nissan Sentra, Mitsubishi Lancer, Saturn Ion, Volkswagen Golf and Volvo S40?

Here’s one way of looking at it. Drive a Ferrari 612 Scaglietti for a year and it will cost you $2,249 in fuel costs alone. Drive an Insight instead and your bill will be $429.

I don’t know about you, but I hate stopping for gas. I run cars on fumes. Last week I stopped at a truck stop at the end of the world. Everybody, from the customers to the guys behind the counter, looked like they were on their last legs. The filthy walls were hung with cheap foreign-made replacement truck parts that looked bound to fail. (Don’t believe me; check out the latest Consumer Reports on shoddy foreign goods for sale on our shores.)

It was a bad scene: The restaurant had ptomaine written all over it, and the bathroom was unspeakable. There were long lines to pay for the probably watered gasoline. If I’d had a Honda hybrid, I could have avoided the whole thing and cruised home with fuel to spare.