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I just picked up my new Capri — loving it so far. Inside is awesome and is surprisingly roomy. I’m finding it handles well on rough stuff on stock suspension and is good all around.
The only thing that remains to be dialed in is that high speed mileage is abysmal. Low speed is decent, even on steep and slow stuff.
As you can see from the pic, there’s a huge gap between my truck roof and the cabover. I’m wondering if that scoop is what’s killing me and am trying to come up with a solution that’s not ugly as heck. I’m thinking of buying some black closed cell foam to fill that, but wanted to get a reality check as to if that’s likely to be a good idea. Thanks,
kyle
I bet you will experience no increase in mileage at all for your proposed modification. When you put a barn door in the bed of your truck the most effective things you can do are to slow down and to feather foot it.
Going from a popup to a hard body truck camper changed our mileage not at all nor did decrease the clearance between my cab over and the bed of my truck by removing one of the riser. Now our cabover rides about 1″ above the marker lights on our cab. The
impact of speed is readily apparent in our F350 Super Duty as you might expect given the exponential relationship between speed and wind resistance.
Steve and Andra
2012 F350 6.2 gasser SRW LB
Fab Fours front and rear in case we run into a rhino
2019 Northstar Laredo SCI kind of suspected that might be the case. This is a pretty obvious thing to try, and it seems like you’d see people doing this in the wild if it worked.
Good incentive to drive slower. Driving through Idaho and Montana against stiff headwinds on 80mph highways was not enjoyable. Control was good enough, but I would have strongly preferred a more scenic and slower route but my GF wasn’t keen on adding a few hours each way to an already long drive.
The drive for us to get from NE Tennessee to the West is crushing. It is do incredibly boring. That makes it hard not to want to drive faster, but higher speeds really do cripple mileage. The single thing we discovered that really makes a different is mountain terrain versus flat land.
We live in the Appalachians so we have a lot of ups and downs, nothing like the Rockies, but we pick up about 1 mile per gallon when we are in Florida.
Mileage has a lot of factors of which aerodynamics are but one of many.
Steve and Andra
2012 F350 6.2 gasser SRW LB
Fab Fours front and rear in case we run into a rhino
2019 Northstar Laredo SCHaving studied aerodynamics I can say unequivocably that the results of your efforts would not result in any measurable improvements. That gap actually gets ‘pressurized’ and acts as if it is filled. Yes, my friend who designed the Gossamer Albatross could provide you with something that would raise your mpg by, say, 0.1 mpg but, trust me, you couldn’t afford him. ?
Easing up on yer right foot will achieve more savings.
It’s good to be a n00b - so I can aspire to be just stoopid.
Monrovia, CA
I think what you are experiencing is called the ‘Phantom Brick Effect’…This same thing occurred with the military’s F4 Phantom which was about as aerodynamic as a brick, yet flew – overcome only by massive amounts of power and dino remains…(lol!!)
I just got my Capri a little over a month ago and went from Texas to Delaware and then back to Colorado. There are a lot of factors in what your gas mileage will be but speed and driving into a head wind are the two biggest. The slower you go the better the gas mileage but I found that driving between 60 mph and 65 mph will still get you decent gas mileage. Driving through Missouri and Kansas I got a lot of head wind and it really hurt my gas mileage.
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