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Why is fuel consumption 5x more per mile but 10x more per hour, if the trucks are moving more slowly than cars?
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Yeah the numbers in this article are all over the place. "291 seconds" also got rounded off to "over a minute", when it's closer to 5 minutes

Good spot, and gruez is right about the caption too (fixed both, thanks).

The car's L/hr figure was wrong. At 45 mpg (imperial) and 70 mph cruise, a car burns ~7 L/hr, not 3. That makes the flow rate ratio ~4x, which is consistent with 5x per mile and the truck travelling 20% slower.

The ~3 L/hr I originally had is what you'd see as an average over a mixed driving cycle — ~30 mph mean across urban, suburban, and motorway. I was carelessly mixing the cars combined-cycle flow rate with the truck's cruise-only figure in the same row.

The truck doesn't have this problem because a long-haul artic genuinely spends most of its operating hours in that narrow 50-60 mph cruise band. "Average fuel burn rate" and "fuel burn rate at cruise" are nearly the same number. For a car they're very different, transient acceleration, idling in traffic, and low-speed urban driving all drag the average flow rate down well below the motorway figure.


That is simple, that one (very cool) interactive matrix only has that one output description regardless of the input. The effect is clear either way



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