IMW Eco-Modding Experiment Results (updated)

For those of you who haven’t been following us for the past few months, here’s the deal:

Earlier this fall, we convinced Hyundai to partner with Illuminati Motor Works, one of the teams competing to design a 100 MPG car for the 2009 Automotive X-Prize, to see how many MPG they could wring out of two factory-standard Sonatas.

We gave them a small budget and just nine days, the idea being that we wanted them to test things that everyday car owners could do on their own, for low cost, on the weekends to boost the fuel efficiency of their existing cars, rather than plunking down $25,000 + for a hybrid. Our premise was that the most fuel efficient car on the road might be the one you already own, so to test this theory IMW tried a ton of common and not-so-common mods and used a ScanGauge MPG reader to measure exactly what difference each made on a variety of road tests.

So here’s what they found, organized in a simple display that we brought with us to Maker Faire in Austin, TX back in October. Just click on the photo then mouse over each section for a description of what the mod included and what difference it made! You might be surprised by what works and what doesn’t….

IMW Experiment Board

Originally uploaded by fdrizo

~ by jonbellinger on October 21, 2008.