Must... resist... urge... to talk about science and politics ha. We are great over here at ramping up unfunded wars and cutting taxes, then suddenly worrying about balancing the budget in a recession (or whatever its called now.) And I actually knew most of that about GPS minus the distances (I'm one of those weird science people), but the accuracy is still fascinating. And technically they are still computers (must adjust for relativistic effects after all) just not computing for me personally
Anyways I did an accuracy test on my second tank of gas since the first was tainted by the dealer and the fact that I don't know at what point they filled up. I couldn't be happier. Well I suppose I could, but I think I did alright. On my second tank I traveled 389.6 miles on 8.35 gallons of gas for an average of 46.66 mpg. Based on that my mpg gauge actually underestimated by .1mpg because it apparently rounded down. I did not yet check speedometer accuracy so that is a potential confounding variable still. All I did was pump up the tires, the rest is stock. This tank was probably closer to 70% highway which helped. I did a lot of coasting in neutral, downshifting to slow (this car kills the engine except at very low speed) and got to know my route and this car for transition points. Will do a grill block at some point still.
Believe it or not in 6 years of driving I've never had one accident or ticket, until 10 days after I got my brand spanking new car when I got rear ended. Murphy's law and all that. Its minor, and its been approved by his insurance, but its a frustrating experience and it took up a lot of my time between my last post and this one. Anyways, turning this post into a marathon now I had an idea I wanted to bring up and maybe it should be a separate thread. Has anyone heard of the app called "waze"? It takes and aggregates driving data to tell you where traffic, speed traps and also cheap gas are. I'm interested in the traffic aspect because I imagine if you avoid stop and go traffic jams your fuel savings could be huge. I wasn't sure if anyone had any inputs or thoughts on this. It seems like a pretty solid driving modification to me but I haven't had a chance to use it much yet.