I
have made a terrible mistake.
Gallons of gasoline spew wildly,
spectacularly, apocalyptically out
of the Ford police cruiser. As I dash
to stop the potential conflagration—
my ears abuzz with furious hornets,
my vision narrowing with the
dreaded rose mist—I wonder how I’d
gotten myself into this mess.Nearly 70 years ago, in the April
1950 issue of MotorTrend, we
published what was our first road
trip story—a Mobilgas-sponsored
fuel economy run from Los Angeles
to the Grand Canyon via Las Vegas.
The rules were onerous: You
had 18 hours and 30 minutes to
drive your stock sedan in the mostefficient possible manner, with the
winner determined by their overall
“ton-mpg ”—calculated by the
weight of the car and passengers in
tons times miles traveled divided
by gallons consumed. The winning
V-8-powered Mercury managed
26.52 mpg over the run, achieving
61.27 ton-mpg. It proved to us—andL.A. GRAND
(^) CANYON
TO THE
2019 Ford Police Responder
Hybrid (Fusion)
2019 Honda
Insight EX
A Lot of Gas
2019
Hyundai Ioniq
Hybrid Blue