A couple weeks ago the San Francisco Region of the Sports Car Club of America (SFR-SCCA) put my Spec Miata race car on display at the Silicon Valley International Auto Show in San Jose.

The first challenge was getting the car there. The San Jose convention center where the show was held was only a couple miles from my shop where the car is stored, but the car hasn’t been registered for road use in over a year. A couple days before the move I went to the DMV to try to get a temporary moving permit, but unbeknownst to me starting this year the rules for issuing these have tightened, and I wasn’t able to get a permit. That wasn’t a big deal, as towing the car was always an option, but spending 30-45 minutes for loading/unloading, not to mention driving an unwieldy tow rig around downtown SJ, seemed a bit silly for moving an otherwise road-worthy car a couple miles.

Once at the convention center, getting the car inside was interesting, involving taking a shortcut driving over the sidewalk to get into the parking garage without driving the car on public streets, and then through a set of double doors onto the main floor. Regrettably our display was on the first floor so I didn’t have the chance to drive the car in and out of the freight elevator.

Contrary to what television shows would have you believe, driving a car indoors isn’t very much fun. Or rather, driving a race car with a solid-hub puck clutch at walking pace indoors isn’t very much fun. The race car clutch doesn’t like to be eased in—trying to do so would stall the engine—so I had to “launch” the car as gently as I could into first gear, then immediately clutch in and let it coast at a walking pace for a short distance, and repeat; not unlike driving in bumper-to-bumper traffic, but just a bit slower.

Logistics aside, having the car on display was a fun time. I set up a looping playback of race videos from last season which, as moving video always does, turned a few heads and caught some attention. Whenever I could I would let people—kids mostly but also a few folks interested in getting into racing themselves—get into the car and have their photos taken. I enjoyed talking to the general public about the SCCA’s motorsports activities and also about my particular experiences; it was nice to have a fresh set of ears to hear my stories.

As an upshot, in preparation for the show I cleaned the car thoroughly inside and out, and kept the outside clean and shiny with generous amounts of detailing spray. The car is probably cleaner than it’s ever been.

We got more winter rains this week, and of course, this being California, it meant that people started crashing left and right again. Every time it rains I get a bit of perverse satisfaction from watching SigAlert light up like a Christmas tree as people demonstrate their ineptitude at keeping their vehicles under control. California drivers suck and rain acts has something of a bottleneck effect: it takes a fraction of the worst drivers off the road, albeit temporarily in most cases.

This week it got cold enough that at modestly higher altitudes snow fell, and as SigAlert showed (excerpt of screenshot shown to the right), even snowplow drivers haven’t got a clue how to drive.

Edmunds.com has a nice article about autocrosser-turned-club racer-turned pro racer Jason Saini, and about Mazda’s motorsports program. Racing in Spec Miata this year has given me great appreciation for Mazda’s support of racing at all levels.

Check out the article over at Edmunds.com.

I find it ironic that at a time when more people (here in North America; this is old hat to folks in Europe, Asia and other parts of the world) than ever are paying attention to new cars’ fuel efficiency, the system people have been relying upon for assessing that metric is becoming increasingly obsolete. I’ve been giving this problem some thought over the past few days and quite coincidentally, today came a press release from the Automotive X Prize organizers that recommended the industry, the EPA, etc. use “MPGe” (“miles per gallon equivalent”) to measure fuel consumption.

However, the X Prize folks are missing the point entirely!

Thinking about how to state fuel economy for an electric vehicle, one’s tempted to find some metric that will allow it to be compared directly to a fossil-fuel-driven automobile—hence the motivation for MPGe. I thought maybe a more esoteric measurement might be more suitable for comparing all cars on an apples-to-apples basis; maybe, for example, mass of carbon dioxide per distance driven, say kilograms of CO2 per 100 kilometres, to use an SI illustration. Of course, the amount of carbon emitted to produce electricity varies greatly depending on the means of production: more for coal, less (arguably none) for solar.

Ignoring that “little” complication, using a unit such as kg CO2/100 km is still just playing around with units. Call it MPG, MPGe, litres/100 km, kg CO2/100 km are all pretty much the same—multiply and maybe invert and you can convert from one unit to the other assuming you can agree on the constant conversion factors. Granted, it would be nice if decades from now when all cars are electric if the unit of energy consumption wasn’t based on some strange brew concocted out of fossil-based hydrocarbons sucked out of the ground, but then again we’re talking about an industry that still often cites engine “horsepower” a full century after cars started taking the place of equine-powered transportation.

What the above fuel efficiency metrics miss is the non-linearity of fuel consumption in some new cars. For example, drive a short distance in the new Chevy Volt and you’ll be getting great “MPG” (100+ is their claim), but drive far enough to deplete the battery and you’ll be consuming real, not “effective” gasoline and at an “effective” rate much greater than when the car was running from the electrical charge generated by more efficient means.

In fact, it’s easy to imagine how “your mileage may vary”: someone driving a plug-in gas-electric hybrid solely a short distance to and from work and other activities around town would see fuel consumption possibly a full order of magnitude less than someone regularly driving the same model of car on long trips.

The ideal solution to the MPG-number quandary would be a better-informed consumer who understands the problem of trying to oversimplify what is in fact a complex aspect of automotive performance. Skeptics and cynics would argue that greater consumer sophistication is unlikely to happen (read: people are stupid), or that auto makers will still want a dumbed-down metric that people can easily understand (read: they want to market to people who they believe are stupid).

Maybe a few energy efficiency numbers based on representative profiles might work; for example, one number representing a driving pattern consisting only of in-town commutes and errands, another number representing energy use for long trips… The two would seem to correspond roughly to the “freeway” and “city” mileage numbers currently quoted for cars sold here, leaving us pretty much where we started. Not good enough!

I think the fundamental question most people have is, how much (dollars, gasoline, CO2, etc.) will a given car cost them to drive? In this age of ubiquitous information-gathering I think that’s not too difficult a problem to solve. For example, based on measured data or, less ominously, a sufficiently in-depth questionnaire, it would be straightforward to come up with a semi-accurate prediction of fuel/energy consumption based on someone’s particular driving routes, style, habits and preferences.

Then again, “straightforward” assumes that it would be easy to get industry players and regulators to agree upon a single standard. Given how much they’ve butted heads over a “simple” calculation for today’s MPG figures, that’s taking a lot for granted.