MPX (Mother’s Pickup eXperiment) deserves its own header, and mixing MPX with MAX is confusing (even to me) so I’m calling this post MPX’s first update. You can read the MPX project overview here.
Here’s MPX (Mother’s Pickup eXperiment) on its way home from the MOTHER EARTH NEWS FAIR in Seven Springs, Pennsylvania. I had just crossed over the Oregon border when I took these photos, and as you can see it was taken last year. How can you tell? Because it isn’t raining.
Yes folks, we’re currently celebrating the annual Oregon Rain Festival. We don’t have the least pleasant winters in the country—not by a long shot—but our winters are serious enough to interfere with testing. Mileage when it’s cold and wet and windy is significantly worse than mileage when it’s warm and dry and calm, and if there are rules of thumb for “How much worse is it, Jack?” I sure don’t know them…but summer-and-winter are apples-and-oranges when it comes to comparative fuel economy testing. And so, for now, we have to rely on last year’s preliminary test data, but that’s enough to show that this streamlined bed cover gives a good bang for the buck. I can’t be precise yet, but over-the-road fuel economy has gone from a smidgeon (see what I told you about precision?) under 25 MPG to within spitting range of 30 MPG. That’s like finding a gallon of free fuel every 150 miles or so—Free Fuel In The Wind, to quote Phil Knox. If that doesn’t impress you, think of the savings over the life of the vehicle: if MPX’s first owner streamlined the bed the day it rolled off the showroom floor, it would have saved well over a thousand gallons of gas by now.
Which ain’t bad for a DIY plank-and-plywood bed cover, which you can crank out in a week of evenings for around $125 in materials. It also offers most of the features you expect in a bed cover, such as keeping your possessions dry—and with the addition of a hasp and padlock, keeping your possessions in your possession.
This is not exactly an aerodynamic breakthrough. Lots of eco-modders have made their own (enough that there’s a generic name for them; they’re known as “aerocaps” among us high mileage zealots) and they average between 12 percent and 15 percent in claimed highway mileage improvement. It makes you wonder why you have to Do It Yourself…if they’re that great, why aren’t aerocaps commercially available? We’ll have to get into that in another update.
Check out the 100-mpg car page for all Mother’s MAX stories, and Kinetic Vehicles to make your own Max.
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