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100 degrees
The wife banged her knee up at Ocean City last weekeend so we decided to take a little day trip south of the James River. We knew it was going to be a hot one and she started whining about pulse and glide so we took HER car and I drove (best gas is that you never use, my vehicles had the day off).
Her 2012 Kia Sorento just hit 30k miles and has had no problems whatsoever other than the problem with the EPA ratings for highway mileage.
This is almost the ideal route for economy, once we got across the river at the Scotland Neck Ferry (free) we took a liesurely drive down route 31 to route 460, hit a couple of antique shops and had lunch at an Italian restaurant in Waverly.
She doesn't mind it being warm and we did not turn on the AC until she saw the sweat on my neck and had a hot flash herself, THEN the AC came on.
On the outbound portion of the trip I got the factory MPG guage up to 34.5 MPG without any techniques other than driving slightly below the speed limit and slowing down gradually, even used the cruise control. We made a few stops during the trip.
After the AC was on we refilled at a Gulf station for $3.29 a gallon and reset the MPG gauge, AC was on low fan and very comfortable as the ambient temps approached 100 degrees. When we got home at 3 PM the temp at our house was 100, first time this year it got that hot. I was surprized the MPG was still at 33.6 since the refill with 100% AC use. We did shut the engine off waiting for the ferry and rolled the windows down.
Her Sorento has been as close to perfect a new car as we have ever owned, It did take some miles for the mileage to get close to EPA estimates. Kia has dropped the ratings on the later years, we still have the window sticker with the 32 highway EPA figures and she gets about $100 a year from Kia for the gas mileage discrepancy, about a penny a mile, not bad.
regards
Mech
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