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Should heavy-duty pickup trucks have window stickers with fuel mileage estimates?

If you were to stroll into your nearest Chevrolet, Ford, GMC, Nissan, or Ram dealership, you'd find a bunch of pickup trucks. Most of those would have proper window stickers labeled with things like base prices, options prices, location of manufacture, and, crucially, fuel economy estimates. But you'd also run across a number of heavy-duty trucks with no such fuel mileage data from the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA doesn't require automakers to publish the valuable miles-per-gallon measurement for vehicles with gross weight ratings that exceed 8,500 pounds. That makes it difficult for consumers to compare behemoths powered by turbocharged diesel engines – between one another, and between smaller, gasoline-fueled trucks. Consumer Reports doesn't think it should be this way, and it's spearheading an effort (PDF link) to get the government to require manufacturers to publish fuel economy estimates. In its own testing, CR found that heavy-duty pickups powered by Ford's Power Stroke, GM's Duramax, and FCA's Cummins diesel engines (which doesn't include the Ram's EcoDiesel) get worse fuel mileage than their lighter-duty gas-powered siblings. We're not so sure HD-truck buyers are unaware of this fact – big diesels don't really come into their own until big loads are placed in their beds or attached to their trailer hitches. Under heavy workloads, the diesel trucks will almost certainly return greater efficiency than a similar gas-powered truck. What's more, HD trucks with lumbering diesels in general make the driver feel more confident while towing due to greater torque at low engine RPM than gas trucks. They also offer greater max-weight limits. Still, we agree EPA fuel mileage estimates should be offered for heavy-duty pickups. And we think the comparisons provided by Consumer Reports might be interesting to potential buyers. Click here to see the results of CR's tests, and let us know what you think using the poll below. Related Video: Featured Gallery 2017 Ford F-Series Super Duty: First Drive View 22 Photos News Source: Consumer Reports Government/Legal Green Read This Chevrolet Ford GMC Nissan RAM Fuel Efficiency Truck Commercial Vehicles Diesel Vehicles poll gmc sierra hd chevy silverado hd

This map reveals the cleanest vehicles based on location

Naysayers love to point out how dirty the electricity grid mix is when it comes to charging electric vehicles. Curmudgeons are eager to jump into any conversation about EVs to enlighten the lucky listeners about how plug-in cars contribute to pollution, sometimes even throwing in a dash of climate-change denial for good measure. (Thanks, buddy. Pray, tell me more about the plight of oppressed SUV owners.) Unless someone buys an EV just because they think they're cool (which, yeah, they often are), they probably have at least a passable understanding of their environmental pros and cons. As many EV owners are already aware, location has a lot to do with any particular plug-in car's carbon footprint. Still, there's always more to know, and knowledge is not a bad thing, especially if one uses it to do the right thing. That's why this handy-dandy map from Carnegie Mellon University is so interesting. CMU researchers have compiled information about the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of various EVs based on where they're charged, as compared to gasoline-powered vehicles. The researchers looked at the Nissan Leaf, Chevrolet Volt, and Prius Plug-In Hybrid versus the gasoline-dependent Toyota Prius hybrid and the stop-start-equipped Mazda3 with i-ELOOP and compared grams of CO2 emitted per mile. CMU takes into account the grid mix, ambient temperature, and driving patterns. CMU takes into account the grid mix based on county, as well as ambient temperature and driving patterns in terms of miles traveled on the highway or in the city. For instance, if you drive a Nissan Leaf in urban areas of California, Texas, or Florida, your carbon footprint is lower than it would be if you were driving a standard Toyota Prius. However, if you charge your Leaf in the Midwest or the South, for the most part, you've got a larger carbon footprint than the Prius. If you live in the rural Midwest, you'd probably even be better off driving a Mazda3. Throughout the country, the Chevrolet Volt has a larger carbon footprint than the Toyota Prius, but a smaller one than the Mazda3 in a lot of urban counties in the US. The Prius and Prius Plug-In are relatively equal across the US. Having trouble keeping it straight? That's not surprising. The comparisons between plug-in and gasoline vehicles are much more nuanced than the loudest voices usually let on.

800k car names trademarked globally, suddenly alphanumerics seem reasonable

What's in a name? This cliched phrase probably gets tossed out at every marketing meeting that happens when a new car gets its nomenclature. We know the answer, though: everything. The name of a car has all the potential to make or break it with fickle customers that are more conscious than ever about what their purchases say about them.
That's giving headaches to marketing folks across the automotive industry. "It's tough. In 1985 there were about 75,000 names trademarked in the automotive space. Today there are 800,000," Chevrolet's head of marketing, Russ Clark, told Automotive News. Infiniti's president, Johan de Nysschen, echoed Clark's sentiment, saying, "The truth of the matter is, across the world, there is hardly a name or a letter that hasn't already been claimed by one car manufacturer or another. You can go through the alphabet - A, B, C and so forth - and you will quickly see that almost all available letters are taken."
What has that left automakers to do? Get creative. In the case of Infiniti, it made the controversial move to bring all of its cars' names into a new scheme, classifying them as Q#0 for cars and QX#0 for SUVs and crossovers. So the Infiniti G, which was available as the G25 and G37, is now the Q50. The FX37 and FX50 are now the QX70.