Show me your numbers...

AndyDe

AndyDe

New member
O.k. since there is a lot of fuel related topics these days, I have been tracking my fuel consumption on my '05 V6 RWD and here are my findings:

I tend to lock the CC between 60-65 mph. I do 70% highway travel so no big deal at 65mph.

I am planning on taking off the roof cross bars this weekend to see if an improvement is achieved.

The results:

Fill up: 7/5/05 at 749 miles.(pumped 17.79 gal/regular/$38.59)

Fill up: 7/14/05 at 1110 miles (pumped 19.99gal/plus or medium grade/$46.76/ 18 mpg)

Fill up: 7/20/05 at 1382 miles (pumped 13.80gal/regular/$30.91/19.7 mpg)

Fill up: 7/28/05 at 1751 miles (pumped 18.75gal/plus or medium grade/$43.11/19.6 mpg)

Fill up: 8/6/05 at 2142 miles (pumped 19.7/plus or medium grade/$46.68/19.8 mpg)

The good thing for me is that I get reinbustment for busines miles @ 0.395/mile.

Show me your numbers....

Andy
:D
 
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I know exactly what you mean about traffic on I-95. I go to Woodbridge/Dale City/Dumfries/Manassas three or four days every week.

Even if I leave Richmond at 0400, I still get caught in that clusterf*ck between Garrisonville and the truck scale at the Dale City exit. :mad: That area just seems to be a huge trouble spot for no apparent reason. A wild guess is that people slow down to read those overhead message signs before you get to the HOV lanes. (Of course, you can see it a half-mile away at 70 mph, so there is no logical reason to slow down for it.)

Fortunately, though, I am in the company truck and my boss pays for the diesel fuel. At $2.40 a gallon and 7 miles per gallon, I know he is not thrilled about it.
:bash:

Anyway, I am averaging 17 to 19 mpg with my '05 4Runner. I'll be taking a trip to Michigan soon, so it will be interesting to see if my mileage goes up. When I drove to New York back in April, I found that I could get a tad over 20 mpg if I could keep her under 70 mph -- very hard to do these days.
 
What always amazes me to see is the steep curve of price increases over the last two years.

sharp, can you post a graph of your data?

The truth is that it will get worse better it gets any better...

cheers
 
Yeah I remember when you can tool around town at $.80-$.95 for regular gas!!!

I'm sure some of you "old timers" can beat me on the price point ;):
 
Gas Prices


While I am hardly in the 'geezer' category just yet, I remember gasoline being in the 45 to 50 cent range during the 1970s. Of course, I was just a kid and came of age during both of the phony fuel crises ('75 and '80).

Back then, gasoline contained LEAD and it was difficult to find UNLEADED fuel when it first was required ('75 and later on cars). Most people hard large, powerful & heavy V-8 cars in those days; but the steep increase in prices helped to bring a lot of common people into the four-cylinder camp.

We had a full-size 1973 Caprice Classic wagon with the "wood grain" trim and a thirsty 400-inch V-8 engine. My mother traded in for a 1980 Chevette. What a change that was! We dealt with it, however, and got where we needed to go. Stick shift, no A/C, no power steering.....but three times the gas mileage of the tuna boat we used to have.
:arrow:

Although even the lowliest econobox of today is better than many 'premium' cars of 1980, I don't want to go down that road again. Remember having to wait in line for gas? Do you recall the odd/even rationing scheme they had back then?
 
When I was in college, I was paying .329/gal for the old Chevy I drove then. Then hit the big time when I foolishly bought a new SS 396 Chevelle the year after I got married. That needed premium at .359/gallon at 8 - 12 mpg.

Actually, we aren't doing so badly even now. If you adjust for inflation, my .329 price back then was the equivalent of about $2.10/gallon at current prices. And I believe that gas prices in the late 70s-early 80s were as bad then as they are now. Alas, I no longer have confidence that prices will ever come back down again.

I was in Germany last fall, and they've lived with prices above 4 USD/gal for years, so I suspect we can do the same. Half of their passenger car sales these days are the new powerful, quiet CDI diesels that are just beginning to trickle into the USA.
 

Yep, I remember the last time I was in Germany - 1986 - and it seemed that about 1/3 of the passenger cars there were diesel-powered. Now, there is good reason for that. They only tax diesel fuel at about half the rate for gasoline and diesel engines get about 25% to 35% more miles per gallon.

Beyond that, it gets very political and you get into sulfur contents, particulte emissions standards, etc., etc. I believe the diesel sold in Germany (and probably the rest of Europe) is "cleaner" than what is sold here.

That being said, today's modern diesel engines are much, much cleaner than the evil soot-belching machines like the old Rabbit and the ill-fated diesels sold by GM (that were merely 'converted' 350 Oldsmobile gasoline engines). For automotive diesel engines, the best one over the years was probably the Mercedes block -- designed to be a diesel powerplant from day one. Volvo had some good ones, but they never caught on much in the US market.

Mercedes announced that they will begin selling diesels again for the US market, after a six-year hiatus. Volkswagen has done very, very well with their near-indestructible TDI engine that they sell in their cars (New Beetle, Jetta, etc.). Diesel cars don't belch blue smoke any more, can be started easily on cold days without a block heater and they don't have black soot all over the back bumpers like they did 20 years ago.

I have heard that Toyota sells diesel-powered 4Runners elsewhere in the world, but they do not do so here. Perhaps that may change in the coming years. Jeep is set to offer a diesel powerplant in the 2006 Liberty.....so other companies might follow.

I drive a large, diesel-powered truck for a living, and know that stoichiometry (sp?) and chemical properties of diesel combustion allows a compression-ignition engine to operate at a much leaner fuel-air ratio than a spark-ignition engine of similar displacement. My commercial truck may only get 6.5 to 7 miles per gallon, but a gasoline engine of that size & power might get 4 or 5 mpg on a good day. {Also, diesel engines don't have spark plugs, ignition coils, plug wires, distributor caps, etc., etc. to worry about.}

Diesel engines also offer a much longer life span when properly maintained. There are a lot of heavy-duty diesel trucks on the road which have passed the million-mile mark and are still going strong. The only drawback is that they do cost more to repair when something does go wrong, and fewer mechanics have credentials to work on diesel engines.


 
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Not a spreadsheet type of guy, but I have been keeping a log of all gas (and other maintenance) since I picked my '03 up from the dealer. I'll have to pull it out to look back at the prices in Feb '03.

My computer reports 20.5 over the last two months (since last time I reset it), and I know it is about 10% over actual. So I am getting about 18.5 average right now. Best I ever got was 21.2, actual on a trip to OK two months after I picked it up.
 
I drive a 96 4 runner (badged Hilux-Surf Down under) 3.0l Intercooled Turbo Diesel.

Fuel prices here in New Zealand have gone crazy lately, I did some calculations and were paying close to $4US per gallon.

Diesel is not taxed in the same bracket with Gasoline fuel here, so it makes for cheaper running (Diesel is about 95 cents per litre as opposed to premium gas at $1.45 per litre (NZ dollars))

As far as performance goes, probably not quite as responsive as the V6 or V8 runners, but huge torque down low, and great for towing. (I've pulled a number of V6 SUV's out of the mud over the past 6 months) I think the 1KZ-TE engine puts our somewhere around 100kw (maybe 130hp?) Custom exhaust and K&N filter help those numbers a bit too :)
 
22 MPG (actual/calculated, not from the optimistic trip computer) on a short overnight trip. SR5 V6 driven in 2WD mode with 3 total passengers and some luggage. Mostly flat highway at 65-70 MPH but also some very slow driving (25%) in a tourist area and some exploration of a couple of small, hilly towns.

Assuming the trip computer error is approximately constant as a percentage, all-highway driving in these conditions at 65 MPH would yield between 24 and 25 MPG but those are pretty ideal conditions.
 
THGis weeks trip

Ok, maybe just a "snapshot", but an actual calculated MPG. Trip down to Lexington, KY this week. Didn't record coming back but going down I got 21.1 MPG after filling up 20.4 GL. This is in-line with other 100% highway trips I have taken.

I averaged 60 MPH (slow, cautious driver) with only two rest/food stops. The trip computer "calculated" 24.2 MPG. It is always 10 - 15% off. At least the thermomoere is accurate.

Regular commuting mileage (80/20 highway/city) continues to average 18 - 19 MPG. On a recent trip with my camper (approx 2300# total weight), I averaged 15.5 MPG (50/50 highway/city).
 
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