Another Measure of How We’ve Been Gypped (and Fooled)

"The new Dodge Dart – a much smaller car, equipped with a much smaller four-cylinder engine – gets exactly the same 36 MPG on the highway as the ’76 Dart Lite/Feather Duster. This is startling, given the new Dart has the benefit of almost four decades of engineering advances – including such things as a six-speed manual transmission, direct port fuel injection and vastly better aerodynamics. Yet the 2013 car only manages to match the mileage of the 1976 car – a much larger car, with a much larger engine fed by a carburetor and without even an Atari-level computer running the show. "