[Frankencar]

Originally Posted by ncwa

I would study the underside of your car and look into a belly pan. I only did a partial under the engine bay back to the transmission. Of all my mods, aside from a tune up and air in the tires, it was easily the best per dollar spent. Just keep an eye out on engine and electronic temps as you can overdo it. Good luck!

Finally have one installed as of 3 weeks ago...

Originally Posted by Frankencar

...
And I finally installed this:



It's a Seat Toledo Belly pan - needs some trimming up front to fit behind the bumper, but makes for a nice underside! And I can't believe how much quieter the car is now! Now it's just the sweet TDI 2.5" straight pipe exhaust note.





And finally the small plastic air channels that go in front of each wheel:




I'm hoping this improves FE a bit.

Filled up 8 times since then as we were on a bit of a road-trip. It along with the LRR tires are definitely doing their job! The car would never get MPG this good on longer highway trips before these mods. Here is the basic rundown of out 2-week road-trip:

There is one thing to mention about the Odometer. It's fairly accurate, but not 100%. We counted miles using the mile-markers on the freeway in 100 mile stretches and on 3 seperate occasions confirmed that the Odometer reads 1% less miles than actually traveled.

Odometer at the beginning of our trip: 234650
Odometer at the end of our trip: 239791
Miles per Odometer: 5141
Corrected miles (Actual miles driven): 5192

We made 7 fuel stops on the trip, and I include the last fill from yesterday in order to see how the MPG was for the whole trip.

They went as follows:

Odo Mi Gal $/Gal MPG Where Filled
234747 810 13.010 3.739 62.26 Stockton, CA
235353 606 11.629 3.649 52.11 Wendover, UT
236106 473 11.769 3.489 63.98 Castle Rock, CO
236867 761 11.682 3.409 65.14 Jackson Hole, WY
237711 844 12.773 3.799 66.08 Kalispell, MT
238514 803 13.166 4.917 60.99 Revelstoke, BC Canada
239168 654 10.525 3.739 62.14 Vancouver, WA
239841 673 11.161 3.999 60.29 Vacaville, CA

with a trip average MPG of 61.618 US MPG. If we correct for odometer error this becomes 62.234 US MPG.

We burned 83.434 Gallons of diesel at a cost of $323.08

(Calculated my only using the portion of the first and last tank that were actually driven on the trip. This was assuming consisten MPG through those tanks.)

We drove through:

2 Countries:
USA
Canada

9 states:

California
Nevada
Utah
Colorado
Wyoming
Montana
Idaho
Washington
Oregon

2 Provinces in Canada:
Alberta
Britich Columbia

4 US National Parks
Grand Teton
Yellowstone
glacier
Crater Lake

5 Canadian National Parks:
Waterton Lakes
Banff
Yoho
Glacier
Mt. Revelstoke

Abd we had 1 vehicle mechanical failure:
Passenger mirror adhesive failed and it fell off. Replacement was sourced at Pick-N-Pull in Kelowna Canada.

EcoModding rules! This trip would have been crazy expensive without the mods.