Winners and Losers: Car Manufacturers and Easy to Find Fuel Economy Ratings

If you're shopping for a fuel efficient car online, some manufacturers make it easy to find fuel economy ratings and some make it a hassle.

Winners:
- Toyota: From their main website, hover your mouse over the vehicle type you're interested in, click "View All", then click "Sort by miles per gallon". Street and highway ratings are provided.
- Nisan: From their main website, click "See all vehicles", then click "View by gas mileage". Street and highway ratings are provided.
- Honda: From their main website, click "All Models". Only highway ratings are provided.

Losers:
- Chrysler
- Ford
- General Motors

For the losers, I couldn't find fuel economy ratings for all their cars at once. I had to look each car up one by one, and even then the ratings weren't easy to find. By contrast, makes side by side fuel economy comparisons easy. Toyota even has Miles Per Gallon as a separate easy to see tab on all its vehicle specifications pages.

Observations: In general, Chrysler, Ford, and GM are lagging behind Toyota, Nissan, and Honda in fuel efficiency. The US auto makers may not want potential customers to be able to easily compare their fuel economy ratings because their Japanese competitors have better ratings in general. Or, maybe it didn't occur to the losers that anyone would want to compare fuel economy ratings because they're not good at anticipating the needs or desires of their customers. My guess is that they didn't anticipate the needs of their customers, so they didn't focus on becoming fuel economy leaders. Then, now that they realize their mistake, they don't emphasize their inferior fuel economy ratings.

Aside: I started doing fuel economy comparisons because I want to be able to pick a fuel efficient rental car. Last time, I took the word of the rental agent, upgraded to a supposedly more fuel efficient car, then found out later that the upgrade wasn't any more fuel efficient. The best place I've found so far for such comparisons is the US Government's Fuel Economy website. On that site, you can search for cars by Miles Per Gallon and look at the most and least fuel efficient cars.