[Niner]

Hey all, joined in the last month or so and finally getting around to introducing myself.

Back in '07 I bought a Toyota Yaris sedan MT. I have a 35 mile one-way drive to work, but it's mostly fast country roads and a few sparsely populated highways in rural Michigan and Lansing. I really got addicted to the 40 MPG I was regularly getting with the Yaris. Then I lost it in a garage fire, and replaced it with a Dodge Caliber CVT (long story, but one was available used and my employer is part of the build process, so I wanted to "eat my own dogfood" as it were). That car was a lot harder to manage, because the computer managed the gear ratio directly. I finally got tired of it and found a Scion xA to trade for it. I'm happy with the setup of the xA, except that the gearing is very "sporty" so not very good at the high speed end - not good, when highway speeds are 70mph here.

Anyways, I'm slowly raising my MPG. No permanent mods to the car yet, but I had the tires raised to 40 PSI (sidewall says 44 max, they came 30). Just before the last tank I installed a MPGuino, which right away got me 2MPG from improved awareness of my fuel consumption. Also adding to the benefit on that tank were my experiments with pulse and glide, and engine-off coasting (which this car does very nicely; I'm thinking about adding an injector kill switch soon)

Planned car mods:
upper grill block, possibly a new fiberglass solid "grill"
lower grill & fog lamp opening blocks
wheel covers
rear wheel skirts
next oil change - 5W20 - got me a few MPG on my old Ford Ranger
better MPGuino location - it's currently in front of the defroster so I can watch it well without looking away from the road. I'd like to add a mirror to get a HUD, and if that works, maybe embed it in the dashboard.


Maybe mods:
kammback - the downward sweep of the rear is not very aggressive, but the inward sweep from the sides is.
final drive swap - the engine and transmission is shared with the Toyota Yaris, but the Yaris has a 4.3 final drive and the xA has 3.7. Nice snappy acceleration, but 3500 RPM at 70mph - no good.
suspension drop - or -
underbody pan (yes, the latter is technically better, but the former is much more plug & play)

How I got here - saw a post on a Scion board about getting better MPG that linked to NeilBlanchard's Mica Blue. Many thanks to him for all the work he's done testing different things on his xA. I hope to take some of his results and make more factory-appearance mods, and share back some of the results.

Henry