DX/LX/EX: Your Gas Mileage

[cojaro]

270 miles on 10.005 gallons

Huzzah for consistent gas mileage! But I'm sure Memphis weather is messing it up, as this weather usually messes anything up.

[truflip]

still at 23mpg mostly highway..
1800miles on car now..

[darna]

quite significant change on mine after my first oil change...

from 26 mpg to 31 mpg (70% hwy/30% city).

[truflip]

maybe i should change my oil now.. meter says 70% left... wadya think?

[SiGTi]

Originally Posted by truflip

maybe i should change my oil now.. meter says 70% left... wadya think?

I change my oil at 20%, sometimes 10%. i get 40mpg.

[truflip]

Originally Posted by SiGTi

I change my oil at 20%, sometimes 10%. i get 40mpg.

i havent changed my oil since i got the car tho.. w/e honda put there is still there... im wondering if changing it to synthetic will improve mileage

[StarbucksSam]

I get like 22... overall.

[fstrnu2]

Originally Posted by Intrepid175

I promise you, the thin air had a LOT to do with it! I seriously doubt that the brand of fuel you happened to have in the tank at the time made much difference. Some will claim otherwise, it's just my opinion.

As we gain altitude, the air does get thinner. I think most, if not all, of us know and acknowledge that. What some may not understand, but I think most do, it that a gasoline burning engine, any of them, require a precise mixture ratio between air and fuel. I think the optimum number is 14:1, or 14 parts air to 1 part fuel. As the car gains altitude, and the air gets thinner, the fuel injection system compensates by providing less and less fuel flow to maintain that proper 14:1 ratio. That's one of the reasons that engine power also goes way down up at altitude compared to what it is closer to sea level. There's simply less air, and thus the fuel injections uses less fuel, and you get less hp but a LOT better fuel economy.

I hadn't caught the fact that you were up in the mountains when you got that 46+ mpg. Now that I know that, it doesn't surprise me in the least. I used to own an '04 Honda S2000. It's EPA'd at 20 city and 25 highway. The highest mpg I ever got out of that car was 36.6 mpg on two seperate tanks fo fuel. One tank was up in Colorado between Durango and Montrose. The other was up in the Siearra Nevada range going through Yosemite Nat'l Park in California. Both tanks spent most of their time between 8000 and 10,000 ft altitude. I was also driving easy, enjoying the scenery so it's not just the altitude, but the altitude does play a significant part in getting that kind of hyper fuel mileage.

Drive Safe,
Steve R.

Genius post I got steller numbers as well on a recent trip to colorado 44.3 mpg from Vail to New Mexico state line but in Texas and Louisiana I could only manage 35mpg with the cruise on 75 and no ac on. By the way lately i've been experimenting with different fuel grades here are my results of my last 10 fillups 87 octane avg. 31.5mpg 90 octane 32.2mpg and 93 octane 34.1mpg. I drove the same routes with each tank and it consists of about 70hwy 30city and using the cruise 99% of the time on hwy @72mph. just my $.02

[Intrepid175]

Originally Posted by fstrnu2

By the way lately i've been experimenting with different fuel grades here are my results of my last 10 fillups 87 octane avg. 31.5mpg 90 octane 32.2mpg and 93 octane 34.1mpg. I drove the same routes with each tank and it consists of about 70hwy 30city and using the cruise 99% of the time on hwy @72mph. just my $.02

Interesting! Have you been flip flopping between the grades in those last 10 fill ups? I would not consider the first tank of a higher octane to be completely valid because it would be partially diluted by the lower octane in the previous tank. Maybe I'm picking nits here but if octane really is that much of a factor in fuel economy, which I tend to discount on a car that's not tuned for premium, then a partially diluted tank will skew the results a little.

I'd be more inclined to trust your numbers if you had run 10 tanks of 87 octane, 10 tanks of 90 and 10 tanks of 93. I'm not saying your numbers aren't valid. I just think they'd be more credible if they were demonstrated over a larger sampling.

One thing I've noted about my Civic is that it seems to be fairly sensitive to the conditions I'm driving in. Headwinds vs tailwinds, that sort of thing. My last long trip, about 2500 miles round, had me averaging 39+ on the way up and 35+ on the way back. The trip covered a three day period so the weather was essentially the same. I was traveling the exact same roads. The only difference was I had a tailwind on the way up and headwinds on the way home.

My point is that there could have been any number of conditions that could have caused the 2.6 mpg difference you recorded that had nothing to do with the octane of the fuel you were burning. A slight shift in the wind that's not noticable from the drivers point of view is all it would take.

FWIW!

Drive Safe,
Steve R.

[fstrnu2]

Originally Posted by Intrepid175

Interesting! Have you been flip flopping between the grades in those last 10 fill ups? I would not consider the first tank of a higher octane to be completely valid because it would be partially diluted by the lower octane in the previous tank. Maybe I'm picking nits here but if octane really is that much of a factor in fuel economy, which I tend to discount on a car that's not tuned for premium, then a partially diluted tank will skew the results a little.

I'd be more inclined to trust your numbers if you had run 10 tanks of 87 octane, 10 tanks of 90 and 10 tanks of 93. I'm not saying your numbers aren't valid. I just think they'd be more credible if they were demonstrated over a larger sampling.

One thing I've noted about my Civic is that it seems to be fairly sensitive to the conditions I'm driving in. Headwinds vs tailwinds, that sort of thing. My last long trip, about 2500 miles round, had me averaging 39+ on the way up and 35+ on the way back. The trip covered a three day period so the weather was essentially the same. I was traveling the exact same roads. The only difference was I had a tailwind on the way up and headwinds on the way home.

My point is that there could have been any number of conditions that could have caused the 2.6 mpg difference you recorded that had nothing to do with the octane of the fuel you were burning. A slight shift in the wind that's not noticable from the drivers point of view is all it would take.

FWIW!

Drive Safe,
Steve R.

I totally agree with you that the conditions could have made 2.6mpg differance i think its also important to point out at $.30 more per gallon for the premium stuff the mpg that i did or didn't save if any was offset by the higher fuel price.

[MyFirstCivic@35]

Originally Posted by StarbucksSam

I get like 22... overall.

What are you towing???

My lowest MPG ever (EX, MT) was 31 MPG. And that was on a tank that I did so many short drives that it took me over two weeks to empty the tank. And the weather was cold.

My highest ever was 37 MPG. I filled it up jumped on the highway and didn't stop until I needed gas again. It was in the spring, warm enough to not drag down the MPG, but cool enough to drive with the AC off.

I usually run around 34 MPG.

[yearight]

Anyone see a correlation between lips and mpg? Is your mpg better with a front/side/rear lips? Worse? No change?

[yearight]

I understand that 90% of mpg is the driver, but for thoes of you that are getting high 30's to 40, how did you break in your engine/transmission?

[Intrepid175]

Originally Posted by yearight

I understand that 90% of mpg is the driver, but for thoes of you that are getting high 30's to 40, how did you break in your engine/transmission?

I just drove mine normally. I didn't hot rod it and I wasn't going out of my way to baby it either. I did try to keep it local where I can vary speed and rpms during the first 600 miles or so. Beyond that, I just drove the thing.

The more I read threads like this one, here and on other forums, I've come to believe that I probably do drive more conservatively than most. I don't consider that I "granny" drive but compared to some around here, I probably do. Still, I do get into it every once and a while, maybe two or three times a tank of fuel but I'm only talking about running through two or three gears while getting on the freeway, not anything sustained over several miles. Doing that, and otherwise spending around 40% freeway (on average) miles per tank, I'm getting between 32 and 34 mpg depending on whatever variables happen to be out there for a given tank of fuel. I have a hard time visualizing how anyone is getting away with driving the car hard enough, long enough, to get it "down" to 19 & 20 mpg. That just blows me away. Then I wonder if maybe they really do have something wrong with the car?

I'll never know that for certain from what I get on this forum. As you correctly said, the driver is the biggest factor in fuel economy. I've met too many people that "thought" they drove in an economical manner, but didn't. I've met people that "thought" they knew how to correctly calculate their fuel mileage, but didn't. I'm not saying that's absolutely the case with any who have posted bad gas mileage here, but I have to wonder. There are other factors that can trend fuel mileage downward. Maybe some of them live in areas that work against them. I just don't know!

FWIW!

Drive Safe,
Steve R.

[truflip]

lets recap..
to calculate MPG
fill up tank.
reset speedo
drive drive drive
when fill up, take note of speedo
then take note of how much u filled up..
take the gallon amount and divide by the miles ran?

if so.. then i got 30.4mpg on my last tank.. but then i put 91 octane on it n ran it hard a few times... 350miles on 43 liters .. thats like 10ish gallons?

Edit: this was on a week of weather no warmer than -15 + windchill. i drive 30km to work one way. i dont idle my car to 'warm' it up either

[yearight]

Originally Posted by truflip

lets recap..
to calculate MPG
fill up tank.
reset speedo
drive drive drive
when fill up, take note of speedo
then take note of how much u filled up.(make sure you fill it up the same way as before) I do 1st click/auto stop of the nozzle
take the gallon amount and divide by the miles ran

I also heard from another thread of a person getting average 26 mpg. Upon further investigation it was found that they drove 2 miles to work and 2 miles back home. This is not enough time to even get the engine warmed up, so thus the low mpg. There are a lot of factors out there.

I wonder how much fuel it burns per minute at idle. With the cold months here, people may idle their car longer than usual at start-up thus affecting the overall mpg.

One other note I thought was interesting, when accelerating to 65 mph. If you baby it you may be wasteing more fuel due to the fact that the car gets optimum mpg when cruze is set at 55-65 mph. The longer you take to get there the more fuel is burned at a non efficient level.

I can't wait until mine is ready. Then its test time.

[truflip]

^^ yea i just drive normally and shift before 3k RPM.. if i hit 65 i set on cruise.. and now i dont take my time gettin there either lol.. i merge smoothly with the highway traffic so yea.. oh well..

Edit: this was on a week of weather no warmer than -15 + windchill. i drive 30km to work one way. i dont idle my car to 'warm' it up either

[Intrepid175]

Originally Posted by truflip

lets recap..
to calculate MPG
fill up tank.
reset speedo
drive drive drive
when fill up, take note of speedo
then take note of how much u filled up..
take the gallon amount and divide by the miles ran?

From what I've heard about you folks that buy your fuel in liters, you generally calculate how much fuel you burn to travel a fixed distance. Example: 7.5 liters per 100 km. I'm not up on the actual forumla for that since I've never calculated my fuel economy that way.

We in the US do it backwards from that. We generally calculate how far we travel on a gallon of fuel. In that case, we take the miles driven and divide by the number of gallons consumed, which is backwards from what you posted above. I just topped my tank this evening. I traveled 286.7 miles and filled up with 8.741 gallons. That works out to 286.7 / 8.741 = 32.78 mpg. That tank was about 40% highway driving. Weather lately had been in the mid 40's F and we've had pretty consistant winds in the 10 to 15 mph range.

FWIW!

Drive Safe,
Steve R.

[IMTHEPUNISHER]

Originally Posted by truflip

lets recap..
to calculate MPG
fill up tank.
reset speedo
drive drive drive
when fill up, take note of speedo
then take note of how much u filled up..
take the gallon amount and divide by the miles ran?

if so.. then i got 30.4mpg on my last tank.. but then i put 91 octane on it n ran it hard a few times... 350miles on 43 liters .. thats like 10ish gallons?

Edit: this was on a week of weather no warmer than -15 + windchill. i drive 30km to work one way. i dont idle my car to 'warm' it up either

Just to be "nittpicky", shouldn't this say "reset odo." & "take note of odo." as opposed to "speedo"? To the best of my knowledge, the speedometer can't be reset. The odometer, however...

[cojaro]

I hope this has been covered, but I still see people complaining.

It was stated on a (R18) Civic's dealer sticker that cars that are rated for 30mpg city are expected to get between 25 and 35 mph city and those rated for 40mpg highway are expected to get between 36 and 44 mph highway (something close like that).

So for those that are getting between 25 and 29 mph city and still complaining: quitcherbitchin'