Ships and planes can chug a fair bit of juice too, come to that! However, we car drivers have the strength of numbers on our side! Here in the UK, there are just SO many of us. Just looking at the DfT stats for road traffic in the last 12 months, HGVs covered 17.1 billion vehicle miles, cars covered 249.4 billion vehicle miles. So if an HGV does (say) 10 to the gallon (to make the sums easier), your (and everybody else's!) cars would have to to about 145 to the gallon to just break even when it came to pollution and fuel use! OK, that's an over-simplification, but the numbers are truly staggering. In reality, trucks tend to have longer working lives, so there might be some older, dirtier trucks in that fleet - but of course, a lot of cars are either old and poorly maintained, or have had various emissions control devices knobbled by their owners too.
Just trawling the 'net for some statistics, I stumbled across this other bit. No idea if it's true or not, but the figures look vaguely believeable (although, I've no idea whether they're talking about Imperial or American gallons - I suspect American ones because he talks about "gasoline":
"...A more interesting comparison is miles per gallon per seat, or the passenger-miles per gallon (pmpg). A 777-300ER can hold 386 passengers in a 3-class configuration, so we get 72.5pmpg. In comparison, a modern 5-seat gasoline car could average 250pmpg, diesel trains can do ~500pmpg and some Volvo buses nearly 600pmpg.
The 777-300ER is not the most fuel efficient passenger aircraft out there, however. Airbus's A320 gets ~90pmpg, and the new Boeing 787-9 comes in at 102pmpg, 41% more efficient per passenger than the 777-300ER.
Even the state of the art 787-9 seems very inefficient compared to land vehicles, but what about cruise ships? Well, the Queen Mary 2 burns a gallon of heavy fuel oil every 41 feet! That's around 0.0078mpg. Seating 2,620 passengers and 1,500 crew, the ship achieves a paltry 32pmpg."
Just trawling the 'net for some statistics, I stumbled across this other bit. No idea if it's true or not, but the figures look vaguely believeable (although, I've no idea whether they're talking about Imperial or American gallons - I suspect American ones because he talks about "gasoline":
"...A more interesting comparison is miles per gallon per seat, or the passenger-miles per gallon (pmpg). A 777-300ER can hold 386 passengers in a 3-class configuration, so we get 72.5pmpg. In comparison, a modern 5-seat gasoline car could average 250pmpg, diesel trains can do ~500pmpg and some Volvo buses nearly 600pmpg.
The 777-300ER is not the most fuel efficient passenger aircraft out there, however. Airbus's A320 gets ~90pmpg, and the new Boeing 787-9 comes in at 102pmpg, 41% more efficient per passenger than the 777-300ER.
Even the state of the art 787-9 seems very inefficient compared to land vehicles, but what about cruise ships? Well, the Queen Mary 2 burns a gallon of heavy fuel oil every 41 feet! That's around 0.0078mpg. Seating 2,620 passengers and 1,500 crew, the ship achieves a paltry 32pmpg."
