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Originally posted by Vandematram

I test drove a new 2011 Ford Fiesta SES Hatchback and very impressed with this car.

1000Km for a 50 Liter tank is quite impressive on fuel efficiency.

At the total price of about 25K on this car-fully loaded it looks like a winner.

I have shortlisted Hyundai Elantra-Touring, Hyundai Sonata 2011 and this Ford fiesta.

Any comments ! or Feedback on the above choices and your experience with a Ford?.

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All these cars are excellent cars. But all of these are Chunna Dabbas, how else could they derive such a Fuel Efficiency, without cutting down on its weight.

Diesel fuel and Fuel Injection has taken over the Efficiencies in newer vehicles and the next generation ones will have them for starters. Also Diesel has about 15% better Fuel Efficiency and the usage of Diesel Fuel and Injection mode will certainly bear it out. You have to see the German Autos for these features.

Now comes the newest technology. The Battery Operated Vehicles. It is in its infancy and as the technology improves, we will see better batteries in the vehicles that will last a lot longer than the current ones.

Just about everything that runs on batteries — flashlights, cell phones, electric cars, missile-guidance systems — would be improved with a better energy supply. But traditional batteries haven’t progressed far beyond the basic design developed by Alessandro Volta in the 19th century. Until now.

Work at MIT’s Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems (LEES) holds out the promise of the first technologically significant and economically viable alternative to conventional batteries in more than 200 years. Joel E. Schindall, the Bernard Gordon Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and associate director of the Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems; John G. Kassakian, EECS professor and director of LEES; and Ph.D. candidate Riccardo Signorelli are using nanotube structures to improve on an energy storage device called an ultracapacitor.

Capacitors store energy as an electrical field, making them more efficient than standard batteries, which get their energy from chemical reactions. Ultracapacitors are capacitor-based storage cells that provide quick, massive bursts of instant energy. They are sometimes used in fuel-cell vehicles to provide an extra burst for accelerating into traffic and climbing hills. However, ultracapacitors need to be much larger than batteries to hold the same charge. The LEES invention would increase the storage capacity of existing commercial ultracapacitors by storing electrical fields at the atomic level.

Although ultracapacitors have been around since the 1960s, they are relatively expensive. They have inherent advantages — a 10- year-plus lifetime, indifference to temperature change, high immunity to shock and vibration, and high charging and discharging efficiency — but physical constraints on electrode surface area and spacing have limited ultracapacitors to an energy storage capacity around 25 times less than a similarly sized lithium-ion battery.

The LEES ultracapacitor has the capacity to overcome this energy limitation by using vertically aligned, single-wall carbon nanotubes — one thirty-thousandth the diameter of a human hair and 100,000 times as long as they are wide. How does it work? Storage capacity in an ultracapacitor is proportional to the surface area of the electrodes. Today’s ultracapacitors use electrodes made of activated carbon, which is extremely porous and therefore has a very large surface area. However, the pores in the carbon are irregular in size and shape, which reduces efficiency. The vertically aligned nanotubes in the LEES ultracapacitor have a regular shape, and a size that is only several atomic diameters in width. The result is a significantly more effective surface area, which equates to significantly increased storage capacity. “This configuration has the potential to maintain and even improve the high performance characteristics of ultracapacitors while providing energy storage densities comparable to batteries,” Schindall said.

“Nanotube-enhanced ultracapacitors would combine the long life and high power characteristics of a commercial ultracapacitor with the higher energy storage density normally available only from a chemical battery.”

This work was presented at the 15th International Seminar on Double Layer Capacitors and Hybrid Energy Storage Devices in Deerfield Beach, Fla., in December 2005. The work has been funded in part by the MIT/Industry Consortium on Advanced Automotive Electrical/Electronic Components and Systems and in part by a grant from the Ford-MIT Alliance.

Here is an EPA Fuel Economy booklet published in the US from their tested vehicles. : http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/FEG2010.pdf
Take a look at the hybrids that give about 50 miles to the US Gallon. It is an astounding performance.

I would consider the Ford Fiesta an in town car. The seats are slightly crammed. Not for bigger people. Elantra is a shade bigger and performs well too. The next generation will come equipped like the Ford fiesta, with a Six speed Automatic Transmission. Sonatas is in a league of its own and way out for these two small buggies. Nevertheless all of them are good vehicles and an improvement from the old generations.

Sonata is the car that i would look into but the Hybrids will win hands down and if you buy one and run it for 10 years. it might pay for part of the purchase price and with its economy and this feature alone will certainly make it a very good buy.

Freddie.