FACTORS AFFECTING VEHICLE FUEL ECONOMY Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

FACTORS AFFECTING VEHICLE FUEL ECONOMY - Essay Example The result of this study will be valuable to the government in developing polices that apply to vehicle manufacturers and which will be effective in promoting vehicle fuel economy. Different factors that relate to vehicles have a significant impact on fuel economy. Therefore, identifying the most significant of such vehicle factors might help in future designing of vehicles to ensure that they have high gas mileage, thus promoting fuel economy. This way, there will be a reduction in the level of fuel consumption as well as pollution from gas emissions by vehicles. There are different studies have shown that there are different factors that affect fuel economy. These are categorised into three groups including vehicle factors such as cruise control, infrastructure factors such as condition of roads and road user factors such as training of driver (Haworth & Symmons, 2001). This research will however, focus only on vehicle factors, from which the variables are drawn. These include weight, engine size, seating capacity, size of the vehicle (e.g. compact, sub-compact, SUV), vehicle model and speed. The research will control for the variables of weather, price of fuel, driver and road condition. This is because the study is interested in vehicle factors only, thus the other variables must be kept constant, as they might affect the overall results if not controlled for. Due to unavailability of ready data on fuel economy, the researcher will collect primary data from the field. This will provide data on fuel economy (MPG), model of vehicle, weight of vehicle, engine of vehicle, seating capacity of vehicle, size of vehicle, speed, size of engine, road condition, fuel price, and driver training. Because of time constraints and resource limitation on the side of the researcher, the sample size will be 200. The researcher will be sure to include vehicles of different