I drove my '99 Ford F150 last weekend to visit my sister and I happened to get the best MPG so far, and the worst tank average since I've been keeping records all on the same trip.
I went 284.7 miles on 17.939 gallons which equates to 15.87MPG.
My Mazda3 can go that distance on almost exactly half as much gas (last three tanks are in the neighborhood of 30MPG), so I didn't believe it at first when I was less than 1/4 tank on the F150 and only went 285 miles. Less than 1/4 on the Mazda is like over 300 miles and a lot less gas.
"Now why didn't you take the Mazda instead of that gas-sucking V8 pickup? Cuz my sister needed help transporting some furniture and gas is cheap so I'd rather keep the miles off my new Mazda.
What's kinda funny about that tank average was that the only city driving on that tank (about 10%) was balls-to-the wall red light to red light city driving, shifting between 2500 and 3000RPMs, and some of the highway driving was bumper-to-bumper traffic. But for all my lead-footed, traffic weaving, aggressive, peeling-out driving, I still managed 15.87MPG on that tank, which led me to think, how stringent are the EPA tests?
Granted they'd probably do 60/40 hwy/city driving while I did about 90/10, but I still wasn't expecting almost 16MPG for the tank when the EPA estimates are 12/15.
Now near the end of the trip, after leaving the Ventura/Oxnard area, I decided to top off the tank before heading home since gas is cheaper down south than here and I went 71.3 miles on 3.115 gallons for an average of 22.89MPG. Since there was almost no one else on the road, I DWL'ed and fluctuated from 50 to 75MPH and only downshifted (turned off OD) on the steep mountains, rather than down south where I had to turn off OD frequently to get more passing power while doing 70-75MPH.
So yeah, it was a pretty exciting weekend.
