Thread: My Little Red Muscle Truck

Tweet

2 mpg would be about a 10% increase on most trucks so I guess to a manufacturer trying to meet ever tightening CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) requirements of the EPA, it makes sense. Never mind the long term downsides to the consumer.

Here's a crazy story that shows just how out of touch federal regulators are. When the new version of the Pontiac GTO, which was just a rebadged Australian Holden Monaro, was first sold in the US, some buyers were noticing amazing fuel mileage from it's non-DOD 5.7 LS engine on the highway. Turns out those clever Aussies had included a separate fuel and timing mapping strategy that allowed the ECU to add timing and lean the fuel mixtures out drastically ( as high as 16 0r 17 to 1!)under certain light load cruise conditions. This apparently resulted in big MPG gains, but as it turns out very slightly raised nitrogen oxide emissions. This extra pollution only occurred at these special cruise conditions and was just a very small amount over the allowable limit, otherwise the engine was clean. GM was forced to disable this feature on any existing car that came back in for service and to completely eliminate it on future models. I think it is called super cruise or lean cruise. So for a slight increase in emissions we could have been saving who knows how much gas nationally if this scheme had been implemented on all LS powered vehicles. The fuel savings alone would have probably lowered total emissions substantially. Fuel not burned doesn't pollute. A crazy example of the regulators not seeing the forest for the trees!