A New Definition of “Fuel Efficiency” in Commercial Vehicles

This paper will demonstrate that, contrary to the usual expectations, commercial vehicles with Automatic Transmissions (ATs) provide dramatically better acceleration performance than commercial vehicles with Manual Transmissions (MTs) or Automated Manual Transmissions (AMTs). It will be shown yet further that, in dynamic conditions of acceleration and deceleration, Automatic Transmissions can provide significantly higher fuel efficiency than MTs or AMTs. Finally, it will be shown that the traditional metric of “fuel consumption”, i.e., liter / 100 km, as it is usually applied to commercial vehicles, is neither an appropriate nor a realistic measure of fuel efficiency.