If you live in the United States and value fuel efficiency, you might catch yourself looking longingly overseas at super efficient vehicle fleets and wondering, why not us? One MIT researcher looked into the predicament and found that though it might not look like we are making strides, we are. The average, fuel efficiency for US vehicles actually increased by 60 percent between 1980 and 2006. The problem is that cars in the US got bigger (by 26% on average) and their horsepower increased (by 107 hp on average), which, when factored in, means that the average fuel efficiency of American cars only increased by a mere 15%. Almost all of the new technology went into making cars more efficient per pound of weight so that the cars could get bigger and still fit within average mile per gallon expectations.
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