[Twerp]

Okay, so this is the thread for my 1991 Honda Civic DX.

I'll start right off with the question... How the hell could anybody get the 29mpg avg EPA rating out of this car? Maybe I screwed up the research, but I'm almost sure that the revised EPA rating is around 29 MPG. Even going by the old EPA ratings, I can't believe anybody could average 33 mpg out of the car.

Without doing any fancy driving, or ecomods, even with only doing minimal work to get the car just barely roadworthy, I managed to get around 46mpg. Something is odd here... I think I should be getting closer to 38 mpg with the driving I've been doing. I'm not complaining, mind you... I'm just trying to figure out why I'm doing so much better than I expected.

My main theory is the tires... Right now I have a set of crappy snow/ice tires. The fronts are nearly bald, and the rears have enough tread to make them annoying and impossibly loud. Plus, there's that annoying "clack clack clack" from the ice cleats. I know I have to replace them and I was figuring that they would be destroying my fuel mileage.

In shopping for tires, however, I came to realize that my snows are not the recommended tire size for my car. They are 155-80-13 or something like that. I believe my car takes 170-75-13s. Forgive me if I'm off on the sizes, I'm still learning about tire sizes. Anyway, the snows are way skinnier than what should be on there. I'm wondering if that is how I'm getting my gas mileage.

I'm planning on putting some standard sized replacements on my car, but I might consider going back to a skinnier tire if my fuel mileage goes down significantly. What I want to know is whether running a size too skinny will create any hazards that I should avoid or at least be aware of. Any thoughts?