Cubic feet is nice, but it won’t tell you if Grandma’s table, flipped upside down, will slide into the cargo area and allow the tailgate to be latched.
My father, a second-generation veteran journalist, admonished me as a youth, “Never believe what you read in a newspaper.”
It certainly seems doubtful that you can believe what you read in the website-posted specifications for some automobiles, or even such regulated communications as the new-car price stickers, as I discovered a while back trying to crank out a couple of stories which depended for sense upon comparative vehicle specifications.
Let me give you some examples. Through the machinations of government, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issues annual fuel economy guides for passenger cars and light trucks. It classifies the vehicles in various size classes: Two-seater cars, Minicompacts under 85 cubic feet passenger plus cargo volume, Subcompacts between 85 and 99, Compacts between 100 and 109, Midsize 110 to 119 and Large, 120 or more.
Basically, it seems to draw its class distinctions from sister agency Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which in turn relies on Society of Automotive Engineering (SAE) guidelines. However, you might call these numbers ping-pong ball count – as in how many balls it would take to fill up a car – and the size classifications are about as useful.
Note that these Government size designations bear no resemblance to how Ford Motor Company and some others classify car sizes as A, B, C, C-D and D; nor how car rental car companies reach their size labels which are, to put it mildly, is unfathomable. Indeed, neither size label system is well defined. Once upon a time, after the import invasion began in force with VW, Detroit responded with smaller cars and such categories as Subcompact, Compact, Mid-sized and Standard (or Large) were used, but I don’t recall that they were well defined, either. Of course, long ago before product proliferation, it “yoostabee” that almost all cars in the American market were the one size, Large.
In the government-calculated system we have now, Toyota Avalon and Honda Accord are classified as “Large,” the same as Lincoln Town Car and BMW 7-series. More to the point, it puts a Prius in the Midsize category, same as Camry, Malibu and Fusion. That’s even though the Prius is three to four inches narrower and 14-15 inches shorter than Camry and Fusion, for example. Aha, you say, that’s because the Prius is more cleverly designed. Not so fast. Although Prius rear headroom is about the same as Camry and Fusion, its rear hip room and shoulder room measure two to three inches less than the other two. Indeed, Prius passenger volume is rated at 93.7 cu. ft., versus 101.4 for Camry and 99.8 for Fusion Hybrid.
Now here’s the big catch: Prius rather amazingly has an “EPA cargo volume” rating of 21.6 cu.ft., vs. 10.6 for Camry Hybrid, 11.8 for Fusion Hybrid and 16.5 for regular Fusions. Indeed, Prius is rated as having larger cargo volume than a Lincoln Town Car or its sister Ford Crown Victoria, now only sold to police and taxi fleets, or the soon-to-be- extinct Mercury Grand Marquis, all known for their cadaver-friendly sized trunks. Folks, I don’t believe that Prius is larger in its bustle. All you have to do is eyeball Prius luggage space through its opened liftgate, compared to the others.
Yet the misleading volume caused a sophisticated cab company operator to opt for buying Prius for his green fleet rather than, say, Camry Hybrid. (See Green Taxi Fleets and Will Your Taxi Of The Future Be Yellow or Green?)
How, could this misrepresentation come about? My hunch is that it’s because Prius is a hatchback, and its rear seat can be folded down so that everything behind the front seat backs is counted as cargo area. But the back seat then can’t be counted in passenger volume. Moreover, many sedans, like regular Fusion, also have fold-down rear seats to increase cargo volume if desired. (The Fusion Hybrid, however, does not, because the battery pack is mounted against the back of the rear seat.) I contend that Prius can’t have it both ways – generous if questionable passenger volume and the largest cargo volume of any passenger car.
This error in rating the size of the Prius carries over into consumer information and ratings published by Consumer Reports, which doggedly and uncritically follows the EPA/NHTSA size ratings.
To be fair, Prius is not the only numbers sinner, whether a result of bureaucratic stupidity or Toyota cleverness. For example, as of mid-January, the Chevrolet website listed the same curb weight for both four- and six-cylinder Malibu models; only after I insisted persistently to Chevrolet Communications that this was unlikely did they finally agree and updated the website. A Ford site for some models listed fuel economy as “not available,” more than six months after they went on sale; that’s now been updated. But Ford also had not updated website specifications for some other car lines, such as Grand Marquis and Town Car, since 2008, no doubt because the ax-wielders were too busy honing their blades to whack Mercury.
Or, turning from specifications on websites, let’s look at price stickers on new cars. A Malibu sticker I saw listed the annual fuel cost based on a per-gallon cost of $2.60 whereas a Fusion Hybrid sticker accompanying a media test vehicle used $1.90. Needless to say, in comparisons, this difference in per-gallon cost favors the car using a lower number.
The NHTSA release for 2010 models used a cost of $2.66 per gallon for regular. The average posted price listed by Gas Buddy this week for Michigan was $2.76—even though news stories a couple of weeks ago predicted gas prices would go down by Labor Day. All these discrepancies from government and automakers make it hard for consumers to compare apples with apples, leaving aside all the other puzzling standard equipment differences on competing models.
Why is all this important? Because consumers, even sophisticated operators like taxi fleet managers, may make bad decisions on car purchases based on erroneous information. And supposedly neutral sources such as Consumer Reports or autotrader.com may innocently supply reader/researchers with incorrect or misleading information.
Now it “yoostabee” that the domestic auto manufacturers were all banded together in something called the Automobile Manufacturers Association, or AMA, which published annual guides called AMA Specs for all member passenger cars, with definitions and inclusions all agreed upon. Part of the incentive for this was to prevent exaggerations, as for horsepower ratings back in the 1950s days of “horsepower races.” It also allowed the various companies to compare their products to competitors without error, all operating from the same information base. But when AMA changed to MVMA and then, under yet another name, admitted import and transplant operators to their inner sanctum, the data collection and dispersal function was discontinued in favor of lobbying.
It’s strange that consumers and, yes, even automotive journalists can’t get such standard information in today’s Information Age. Recently, in order to move some furniture from one distant household to another, I needed to compare the cargo space of three different family vehicles, all more or less describable as station wagons (SUVs and Crossovers). The media web sites did provide the cubic-foot size of the areas behind the front seat with the second seat folded—but failed to list the more useful dimensions of height, width and length of the space and especially the distance between wheel housings, items which yoostabee part of the AMA Specs.
The 2011 Honda Odyssey media packet boasts that with seats folded out of the way, this new-bodied people-cum-cargo mover, a minivan, can carry a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood laid flat, a most desirable feature. But the specs don’t actually provide the measurement between rear wheel housings.
Cubic feet is nice, but it won’t tell you if Grandma’s dining room table, flipped upside down, will slide into the cargo area and allow the tailgate to be latched.
Message to Detroit, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Sweden—and now Italy: Bring back the AMA Specs under whatever auspices and name. After all, what do you have to hide?