Ignorance is Bliss

Keep it near the red line. Anything less is sacrilegious!

I had a Dodge Dakota R/T and it had average and real time mpg. Average mpg was bad enough – around 14 – but if I really got on it, seeing the number drop to 1 or 2 was a real eye-opener.

I know my L32 Firebird gets better average MPG than that. I do a lot of highway driving, the length of my commute and how much is going into the tank.
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Isn’t there something wrong when a Firebird owner is looking down his nose at a Subaru’s gas efficiency? Whatever the case, I’m amused by it.

In response to Dhillaz, the car MAY have different emission equipment here. I don’t know what your government mandates, but ours is pretty strict and more emission equipment means lower mpg. Also, our fuel here has gotten very low quality. Yes, ethanol (corn fuel) burns very clean but it also gets you terrible fuel mileage. That’s the little details that the government and manufacturers don’t tell you. The E85 fuel that is so heavily advertised by manufacturers is a complete rip off. E85 gets you roughly 40% of the mileage of regular unleaded in the same vehicle. So if your vehicle gets 30mpg, E85 will drop it to somewhere around 12mpg. Great deal for the fuel stations since E85 is generally only a small bit cheaper than unleaded. What does this have to do with your Forester you ask? Well, here in America most fuel stations mix a 10% blend of ethanol into their regular unleaded. This is not a statistical fact, but I’d estimate around 85% of stations do this. That 10% blend is good for about a 2-4mpg drop in your vehicle over pure unleaded. If you don’t believe that they do it, just read your pumps. IF they have ethanol mixed with their fuel, they are required to have it posted on the pumps, at least here in Oklahoma they are. From what I’ve heard, a 10% blend is mandatory in some states such as California. Don’t know if that’s true. Back to I don’t know what your regulations are and I definitely don’t know the quality of fuel there in the UK, but our fuel here sucks. To anyone who wants to know where I get my info, I get it from what I’ve seen as a technician at a new car dealership. We’ve had countless customers complain that they got a tank of E85 and their mileage dropped to barely a third of their average. And every since they started mixing the 10% blend, we get people all the time thinking their’s something wrong with their vehicle because it’s lost a couple mpg and we explain to them why. We still have a couple good station in my town and I average 16mpg city in a 1990 GMG with a 350V8. On a 10% blend fuel from the station I used to use, I averaged 13mpg city.

Are you sure nothing’s wrong with the car? To get such poor mileage in a Forester, you’d have to punch a hole in the fuel tank, and leave the engine idling overnight! Unless your US Forester is different to our UK one.

I agree with “Ihatemybike” I have an average mpg guage in my 00 Grand Prix and its keeps me from putting the hammer down to much. By no means do I drive like a grandma, but I did find that at 80mph I seem to have a fuel economy holy grail where I go fast enough that Im barely on the gas and allows me to get 24mpg if I stay out of the city. Not great milage but the guage helps.

Good point, ihatemybike. But I already tend to drive a bit like a grandma in the daily driver–mostly to keep the wear and tear on the vehicle down, but I’m sure better gas mileage is a benefit, too. I only leadfoot around in the Mopar.

It is a constant reminder and can be a helpful tool to change your driving to increase mileage. In my ‘99 Astro I keep the current MPG displayed on the info center and on my ScanGaugeII the RPMs, throttle position, trip MPG, and current gallons per hour is displayed. By actually paying attention to these and modifying my driving habits, I went from 16-18 mpg to over 21 mpg.

I’d be thrilled to see 20.1 in my mpg display.