Quote:
Originally Posted by endurance
Do you have a ScanGauge?
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I don't have one yet. I might get an Ultragauge for Xmas. In the meantime, I've been tracking tank to tank and begun to watch needle points carefully and take notes to get within tank feedback as well as between.
As a basic example, if your fuel gauge has 4 points (1/4, 2/4, 3/4, 4/4), and you have a 10 gallon tank, and you hit 100 miles at each point and run out of fuel when you hit 4/4, you've done 40 mpg. This means that on your next tank, if you hit the 1/4 at 100 miles, you know you're on your way to a 400 mile tank at this current rate, and are currently averaging 40 mpg. If you hit 1/4 at 125 miles, that puts you on pace for a 500 mile tank, or 50 mpg. So I'm basically taking notes at where the needle is during my tanks to see how predictive my miles at particular needle points may be of my eventual mpg. It also gives me more rapid feedback of how my mpg over the last few days have been rather than my having to wait for an entire tank to go by. For example, if I hit 100 miles at 1/4 but only 150 miles at 2/4, that means I got 20 mpg between the 1/4 and 2/4 mark, which is much faster than waiting until the end of the tank, hitting 350 miles at 4/4 (presuming I covered 100 miles per 1/4 as usual from then on) and wondering why I got 35 mpg overall this tank.
It's nowhere near as precise as the instantaneous feedback of instrumentation, but it's several times faster than between tank information.
My first3 tanks with the Tercel have netted me 37, 40, and 35 mpg. Based on my needle reading, the current tank I started last week has a high chance of being a 45+ tank. I'll add more details as I get more numbers.