Originally Posted by
The Finn
Awesome post. I've always wanted to graph the relationship between speed and MPG so I know how fast I can go on the highway before the MPG takes a huge dive due to wind resistance and stuff.
My pre-calc professor once put up such a graph of a Ford taurus's MPG to show how it's a parabola (-X^2) with MPG as the depended variable (Y-axis) and speed the independent (X-axis), and everyone was literally falling asleep...
Suppose I'm in the minority here cause I love this stuff, and I regret not going on to Calc I.
Yeah, the relationship looks like that because at low speeds you can't get up into the good BSFC curve, and at high speeds, you're burning energy on aero drag, which increases with the square of velocity.