Dumb Question - Economy Mode
 

Don't know so I'll ask.... do the LS3 engines have the economy mode feature where it switches from 8 cyl to 4 cyl on the highway when cruising along and the engine is not being taxed?

I don't think so but thought I should check before I get into an argument with a friend of mine.

Thanks

No... that would be your right foot...

No and think the lord for this as they all ready are economy cars until you hammer the go pedal:rock::woohoo:

Thanks, that's what I thought but wanted to be sure.

His argument by the way is the only reasons vettes get decent fuel milage on the hwy is they have the economy mode feature and I told him I'm pretty sure they do not but now you've given me the info needed to become a little more firm on that statement since he's still being an ass.

I pissed him off in a general conversation because he was touting in a group session how hybrids were supreme to all, so I calmly out of the blue said based on mpg/hp vettes are more fuel efficient than his prius and that didn't sit well with him, and thus started his ranting. Not sure if my statement is truly accurate or even correct but it sure is fun to get him all riled up. :thumbs:

Also post the question on how long do those toxic batteries last, how are they disposed of, and what does it cost to replace them.

Don't forget to ask about the carbon foot print for the manufacturing process involved with Prius batteries!

Corvette isn't an econmy car, thank God.
Capt Bob

As mentioned, there is no displacement on demand.

There is, however, an optional economy feature you can purchase. It's a small wood block you tape under the gas pedal. ;)

I'd tell 'em that Vettes don't have to drag along a whole lot of ugly, like his Prius does..

Not a dumb question as the Displacement on Demand feature is part of some GM engines that are based on the LS engine. They just haven't done it on the Corvette engine......yet...:thumbs:

Our 2007 Suburban has it but unfortunately it's causing the engine to have the dreaded excessive oil consumption issue (Tech Bulletin# 01-06-01-011F) prone to 2006/2007 4.8L or 5.3L engines where the oil rings gum up due to the displacement on demand feature and causes the engine to use 1 qt of oil every 800-1K miles. Huge fight with GM on that right now from various owners.

So glad the vette doesn't have this feature.

It's not worth it you have to get out of the car and remove 4-plug wires. Then do it all over again.

Ask him where the electric is coming from to plug in his Prius? Ummm the power station down the road with the large smoke stacks.

MPG/HP is a weird way to argue efficiency. I don't know any way to prove that in the real world. In a lab, you'd have to run the drive trains at equal HP outputs to really be able to compare. I have a Camry Hybrid as my daily driver and a 2009 coupe as my "fun" car. There's no situation that I've found where my Corvette gets better gas mileage than the Camry. On highway driving the Camry gets me 36 mpg and the Corvette gets me 28 mpg. In the city driving to work and back, the Camry gets me 34 mpg and the Corvette 16 mpg. Hybrids work very well in city traffic because they can recapture the energy from braking that gets wasted as heat on regular cars.

In my opinion, its all about using the "right tool for the job". For general commuting, I want high efficiency and there's little place for having any fun in city traffic. When I drive my Corvette, its for the fun of it and I don't care much about its general efficiency. Sure its great that it gets relatively good mileage, but its not the reason that I bought the car.

- Mark

:iagree: 4 sure!!!

Top Gear did a test that came close to that situation. They had a Prius go around the track as fast as it could, then had a 3 series BMW follow right along behind it. Then they measured the gas consumption of both cars over the exact same course and found that the Prius used more than the Bimmer.:thumbs:

Exactly! :thumbs:

I'm glad we don't have the Displacement OD system.. the vette is not a good application for that system.. extra cost, complexity and not much
benefit. With the over-drive gearing and low end torque, the LSx doesn't have to rev much which makes for descent mpg especially on the hwy.

:iagree:

New auto Camaros has this feature and get 17.5 around town and maybe 25 on highway cruise control set on 75. So i wonder what it would get without it.
z51vett

The Camaro SS LS3 variant has this feature on the A6 SS's. So maybe that's where this is coming from.

Tom

The "Pius" drivers here in NorCal simply refuse to believe me when I tell them that my Vette routinely gets 25-26 mpg and doesn't look like it was carved from a block of clay by somebody on high powered pharmaceutical drugs. Calling a Prius ugly is actually being nice.

:cheers:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2263/...2b10de3b_o.gif

GM messed with displacement on demand with the vette, but scrapped it because it presented unsatisfactory driveline harmonics/resonance. In other words, they couldn't make it "transparent" feeling in the vette.

Probably also didn't hurt that the vette gets pretty good mileage as it is.

At least the system works better now than it did in the past....remember the V-8-6-4 Cadillac engine of the '80s????? What a nightmare!:thumbs:

It is fun to mentin the fuel efficience of our Corvette's when the hybrid dirvers start bragging.

When I was a young man working in the '70's, we had a coworker who religiously checked his fuel consumption and then bragged about his great Maverick. Some other workers started adding fuel to his tank and his bragging got worse. He couldn't believe that he would sometimes acheive 50mpg! The pranksters let him brag, but then they started removing just enough fuel to screw up his fuel mileage. He just clammed-up and if forced into talking about it, he would cite what his maverick did "last month". It was hard to keep a straight face. I would love to try this with some of my super-miler hybrid driving friends.

That is AWESOME!:thumbs: I have to figure out how to do that to one of my neighbor's rigs. He would go ballistic if his "WunderCar" starting getting 15-16 MPG all of a sudden:lol::lol:

What a great story!!!:thumbs:

Wish I had thought of doing that to one of my co-workers. :cheers:

:lolg: You know, if a vendor came out with a nice aluminum one in different colors, they'll be some that buy. LOL

:rock:

:thumbs: That's Hilarious!!

We may see DoD in the C7. They have to do some work to get driveline vibration issues solved with direct drive powertrains in light cars. Its probably a matter of ECM tuning and extensive testing to see how to switch back and forth without shaking the car noticeably.

My daughter's 08 Tahoe Hybrid has it and when it switches you can feel just a very slight tremor. In a car that weighs close to a ton less than the Tahoe that tremor might make the occupants think they had experienced an earthquake.

Bill

Cylinder deactivation is what they call it now. The "Dead on Delivery" as we called it in house is no more. It really didn't pan out all that well. If you every drove one you almost had to be on a dyno to get it to stay in 4 cylinder mode. Just a little tip in on the throttle and it was back to a full eight.

I'm sure some vendor here will come out with a block made of carbon fiber....:rofl::rofl:

Like I said . . . . :D

print this article and give it to him

Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.
The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius’ battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist’s nightmare.
“The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants and the soil slid down off the hillside,” said Canadian Greenpeace energy-coordinator David Martin during an interview with Mail, a British-based newspaper.
All of this would be bad enough in and of itself; however, the journey to make a hybrid doesn’t end there. The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce ‘nickel foam.’ From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery. Are these not sounding less and less like environmentally sound cars and more like a farce?
Wait, I haven’t even got to the best part yet.
When you pool together all the combined energy it takes to drive and build a Toyota Prius, the flagship car of energy fanatics, it takes almost 50 percent more energy than a Hummer – the Prius’s arch nemesis.
Through a study by CNW Marketing called “Dust to Dust,” the total combined energy is taken from all the electrical, fuel, transportation, materials (metal, plastic, etc) and hundreds of other factors over the expected lifetime of a vehicle. The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles – the expected lifespan of the Hybrid.
The Hummer, on the other hand, costs a more fiscal $1.95 per mile to put on the road over an expected lifetime of 300,000 miles. That means the Hummer will last three times longer than a Prius and use less combined energy doing it.
So, if you are really an environmentalist – ditch the Prius. Instead, buy one of the most economical cars available – a Toyota Scion xB. The Scion only costs a paltry $0.48 per mile to put on the road. If you are still obsessed over gas mileage – buy a Chevy Aveo and fix that lead foot.

Pretty sure we will see DOD (displacement on demand) in the C7 5.5 liter.

I have a 2009 Dodge 1500 Quad Cab with 5.7 Hemi. Its 390 horse. Mine has a 3.92 sure grip differential and 20 inch tire/wheel package. It has multiple displacement system (MDS) Goes from V8 to 4 cyl. It works flawlessly. It is piratically a seamless transaction. If I didn't have a duel Magnaflow exhaust other then the fuel saver light I'd never know it was swapping. That system has been out several years on the Dodge Hemi and no real issues of any sort have been a problem. Oil usage has not been a issue. Some of these trucks on the forums have 200k plus miles and no issues. I ran a Cadillac service dept a few years. Saw a few Cadillac v8/6/4s come in. It was a mechanical system. I had a tech that could and did make them run and work pretty good. He said the biggest issue with them was butchers working on them. He spent more time fixing others butcher job then he did fixing the original issues. They were only in production 1 year I believe.

1 hp=2,545 BTU
1 gal of gas=115,000
My Prius II goes one hour @ 62 mpg @ 60 miles/hr.
My 08 Vette goes one hour @ 30 mpg at 60 miles/hr.

So the Prius uses about 26 hp to travel that distance.

The Corvette uses about 60 hp to travel the same distance.

Logically then the Prius is more than twice as efficient as the Vette.

Comparing peak hp to each other is meaningless for efficiency. How far and often does one run any car at it's peak hp?

The Vette is 436 hp and the Prius II has an 80hp traction motor and the 1.8 liter 99 hp gas motor.

By the way the Prius does not use Li-Ion batteries, they use magnesium hydride batteries made by Panasonic. To insure the supply Toyota purchased Panasonic. Many of the original 2002 Prius's with over 200,000 miles still have the original battery according to a auto review in the transportation section of last weeks Chicago Tribune.

How long do the batteries last in our Corvette's.:rofl:

Toyota does not own Panasonic, they are in a joint venture together to produce batteries which is called Primearth EV. It is 60% owned by Toyota and 40% by Panasonic. Current Prius batteries are of the Nickel Metal Hydride type.:thumbs:

Or maybe the nuke plant surrounded by bloodthirsty mutants!

FYI The Prius does not plug in, its electricity is regenerated via its brakes.

Yeah but they all likely mostly toast by now. My wife has a 2004 and it only gets about 35mpg now because the battery is mostly toast. Its under warranty, but they will only replace it if the warning message pops up, which indicates the battery will not take a charge. If it takes a charge, any charge at all, its not covered.