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100 mpg is probably a stretch to be fair.

But they would be significantly better than the market can currently offer.

The unfortunate thing is due to the regulation and taxes we will never know what types of vehicles would be on the road now if they wasn't easy targets for politicians to pick on.

Not really.

Is 50mpg achievable -- or even not very hard? Yes. Hell, there's a car in my driveway that gets it right now on the highway, and mid 40s in city driving. Of course that's on diesel, which has a ~15-20% BTU advantage over gas.

My Mazda can break 40 if I keep my foot out of it on RUG. The "3", smaller and with the 2L instead of the 2.5L, can get very, very close to 40mpg at 70mph and I bet it would get 45mpg at 55mph. Both of those are aerodynamics, but there's a limit to how far you can reasonably go.

How much more can you get? Not a whole hell of a lot when it comes to an ICE -- unless you are willing to drive an INLINE 2-seater (what Elio was going to make), in which case an honest 70mpg is almost-certainly achievable. But what we have now is pretty damn good.

That's particularly true if you put a larger engine in because you want oodles of go-juice when you stomp the loud pedal. You pay for those moving parts and their losses all the time. All things equal 4 pistons have less drag than 6, and smaller-diameter pistons have less swept area, and thus the rings have less drag on the cylinder walls. And so on. The old idi Diesel Rabbit handily got 50mpg without anything fancy, but you could also pick the back end up with your HANDS if you had to and it didn't have 500lbs of extra crap in it mandated by the government, all of which you have to accelerate.

Why do trucks get 15? They're a brick, basically, from an aerodynamic point of view, and at speed its basically all air resistance.

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