Alright thanks, I'll look into that. I actually took the car on it's 1st distance cruise today. I did the 1st fill up and it was at about 35mpg since purchase. Obviously horrendously low, but I also drove the car about 70/30 city and drove it really hard a few times, just to see how the car behaved and what's it's limits are. I also had it idling for the better part of 3 hours probably through warming it up in the cold, dealing with fluid changes, and playing around with things while inspecting it.
Anyways, I drove across Ohio today, but before the trip I put in Shell 93 V-Power fuel. I'm not expecting anything beneficial from the octane rating, but I wanted to run their cleanest fuel and presumably least ethanol content fuel(still waiting to hear back on that verdict). At any rate, it ran fine on it...couldn't really say for better or worse, but maybe a little smoother, but it probably had nothing to do with octane, but the additives. I stopped in Akron at a BP, just to see how much fuel I went through driving from across the state and it came out to 52mpg, which was commendable as I drove 65-75mph the entire way there, but I was bouncing in and out of lean burn, but was in lean burn maybe 4/5ths the trip.
I've only had the car 2 weeks and of course a snowstorm hit Mansfield and my tires are at 50psi and the car slid off the road and had to be towed out. Luckily, I don't think anything was damaged or hurt and neither was any of the 7 other vehicles that slid off in the same spot...go figure...just my luck that a new vehicle has this happen.
At any rate, I drove back from Akron and I noticed something a little odd. Earlier on the trip and since I have owned it, I was pulling 2100rpm at 65mph. On the way back, I was pulling 100rpm less at 2000rpm at 65mph. I know that seems like a trivial difference, but to just suddenly decrease 100rpms for no reason seemed quite odd to me. This was on perfectly level ground. At any rate, it seemed to be able to stay in lean burn a little longer around 70mph, instead of 65mph.
Perhaps, the previous owner just had it sitting too long and it just needed ran...or maybe the Shell V-power actually cleaned up some bits of the engine from running through it long enough....hard to say, but we shall see. On the way back, I probably averaged about 40mpg, but I also drove through the Akron city more and we were idling off the side of the road for almost 2 hours, AND battling treacherous snow at lower speeds in lower gears for quite a while, so that was actually commendable.
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