Took my drivers test in one of these. On any serious hill it struggled to do 30-45mph.
Our family had one of those and my youngest brother made 800 mile round trips in “Smokey” to mining school in Rolla, MO routinely getting high 30s and low 40s MPG.
That is also the VW diesel engine that the EPA lab in Research Triangle Park NC converted to spark ignition and ran on methanol without changing the compression ratio, as described in their very educational late 1990s scientific paper. Diesel cycle and Otto cycle energy efficiency was within 1% of each other.
That's very interesting. If you have any links to those tests I'd love to read them. Thank you
