2007 GMC Canyon - It begins ;-)
 

I am one of those guys that needs a truck. I actually use my truck as a truck, but don't drive it unless I "need" the truck. It is amazing the amount of stuff I can shove in a Honda Insight! LOL

Well my old truck has been a long time source of issues. I keep pouring money into it seems like every time I turn around. Now is not an exception. It once again thinks it needs to see my mechanic. Well I have decided that it's gas guzzling days are numbered here after a long run and a lot of work done together.

So I am going to be flying out to WI this weekend to look at and probably pick up a 2007 GMC Canyon. I am stepping down from the full size Dodge Ram 1500 4x4 Crew Cab to a 2 wheel drive, 4 cylinder, 5 speed extended cab small/mid size truck.

So I wanted to post here and track my economy and the improvements to the truck over the next month or so. I am a modest hypermiler, and haven't done much in the way of Ecomod's, but have followed here on the forum for a long time. Trucks are a tough cookie to crack to get good economy from them, but as witnessed by some amazing drivers here on this forum it can be done. I don't plan any extreme mods for this truck, but will do some of the basics and try to track what each change does to the economy.

I will start off by picking up the truck in WI and driving it back to CO. I will track the economy of that trip. Only mods will be to air the tires up to max sidewall pressure, connect up the Ultragauge, and then hit the road looking to see where the maximum speed for the best MPG is found. I will try to log and keep track of the various road cases on the Interstate and log the fuel economy for a baseline for when I get it back home.

From there the planned changes immediately will be a new set of tires, and tonneau cover. I will try to make a few runs to log the differences between the mods over a known distance and route to see what the impact of the changes might be. From there I am considering a grill block and lower air dam extension and will track those changes. The rest of the changes will be adjusting the LOOSE NUT between the seat and the truck controls. The objective is to show that a small/mid size truck can be tuned to get decent mileage without having to do anything too extreme and keep the truck looking fairly stock. I am hoping I can squeak out 30mpg on the highway at a reasonable speed, and keep it near the mid 20's in town. That would be the goal here. Trying to keep the goals modest and within reach and hope for something better as we go. :-)

So wish me luck. I will keep posting here to let everyone know how it goes with the truck.

UPDATE: Here are some pictures of the changes as they are progressing. I cannot get them to post on this site for some reason, but here are the URL's. Please let me know if you cannot get to the pics.

So far tonneau cover on, and air dam built and installed:
Let's try it below by URL link:
https://goo.gl/photos/aajygtsdBRskQwmVA
https://goo.gl/photos/PxAgzACiHXXB7TPx7
https://goo.gl/photos/8z759aBbZ64ZsA2V8
https://goo.gl/photos/PsSzGJXQNBkeMDmA9
https://goo.gl/photos/E4DDmpsWJNZGm2YD9

Longsnowsm

That's about right for a stock Canyon at 55 MPH without a headwind. Pumping up the tires to about 50 PSI will help.

I hope your right!
 

JRMichler, I hope your right, from your lips to God's ears! I have been lurking out on the 355Nation and on ColoradoFans and searching out fuel economy posts and it is frankly very depressing. This truck really doesn't look like it gets great economy out of the box from the factory and that is before folks go crazy lifting, tuning, changing, and driving it like they stole it. So I am getting a little nervous about the fuel economy from this truck. I guess I will find out soon enough what I am in for with this truck.

I am hoping that with a few mods like the tonneau, grill block, and lower dam that I will be able to stretch that out to about 30mpg at 60-65mph. I do a lot of highway miles when I have to use the truck so being able to stretch that fuel economy and cover some distance in a reasonable amount of time is the goal.

Since I am losing some carrying capacity with the smaller truck I am going to be looking into getting a small trailer that I can tow behind it for hauling and moving things that won't fit in the bed of the Canyon and give me some of the capacity to carry and move things back only when I need it. That is the game plan at the moment anyway.

I love your aero cap on your truck!

I once drove the company Colorado (same truck as the Canyon). It's an extended cab 5 cyl automatic with 4WD. Driving a steady 55 with almost all highway miles, and based on watching the gas gauge, I got about 30 MPG. These little trucks are capable of getting good mileage at 55 MPH or slower. Speed up to 65, and the mileage drops a good 20%.

My mod thread: http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...yon-17070.html

1. Congrats! Those seem like spiffy little pickups, of the sort you won't find anymore.
2. Well they're truck owners, duh! Generally they have more money than sense (although I can see the appeal of a big truck, just not truck nuts).
3. Drop it like it's hot.:cool:

Thanks JR! I have been reading your mod thread with great interest! I think I will follow your lead and bump up the tire size as well. Do you then manually calculate your mileage or did you have your truck flashed to adjust for the tire size change?

Is your truck an automatic or the manual?

Thanks, I was looking for the most efficient truck possible to replace my big gas guzzler. So I was actually looking for a Ford Ranger in the configuration I wanted, 4 cyl, 5 speed, extended cab, 4x2, taller gear, limited slip, and towing package, and with a reasonable number of miles on it... Well it turns out that is a tall order! And I wasn't able to find one locally or in a long distance search. If I did find one the cost was outside of what I am able to spend.

So I started broadening the search and stumbled on the Chevy/GMC trucks. So far I don't think it looks like they will get anywhere near what the Ranger will for fuel economy, but it looks like an acceptable compromise. I was able to find the combination of things I was looking for at a price I could afford so now I have to go get it... I again could not find one locally which really stinks. But I do get to road trip it home and baseline how it performs, so that part is fun!

Yes, the truck forums are frustrating at times. They don't have the same focus that I do. I need a truck to be a truck, and I need it to do so as efficiently as possible. Getting that kind of info is hard. People think they need more than they do. My needs are modest, but modesty in the vehicle market seems to be missing... :-)

The trip home
 

Well I bought the truck and got it home Sunday. The wheels on the truck are not the OEM wheels so the wheel size is larger than the stock wheels. They are still a GMC wheel, but I don't think those were offered on this truck. It is a 16" wheel. The dealer decided to put new tires on it for me and chose a 235/70R16 which is slightly larger than the tire that I was going to put on the truck in a 225/75R15. However this worked out well as the 16" tire he chose is slightly taller than the tires I was going to put on it and that made it great for highway driving.

Now the results so far after 2 tanks, and haven't calculated the 3rd tank yet as I didn't fill up yet. But it looks like the factor to use with the larger tire is 1.0833 multiplier so my first tank was 27.44 mpg at 65 mph(per gps) with the cruise control on. The second tank it looks like 26.09 mpg with some cruise control, and some drafting, but I did run into some cross and headwinds. On the last tank which I haven't calculated I got into a bunch of construction, some bad weather, and a tailwind so I think the economy will be higher on this last tank, but I won't know until I go and do the fill up.

So I am pretty happy. The max sidewall on the new tires is 50 psi so that is what I set them to for this trip. At 65-66 mph per the GPS the tach is telling me about 2150 rpm. The truck has plenty of power and drives pretty nice for a truck.

So my tires upgrade was done for me, and not the tire I would have chosen, but I am pretty happy about getting new tires out of the deal. Just gives me some money to get my bed cover sooner and to get some of the things that need to be done on the truck completed like the fluids change in the rear diff, transmission, and the engine oils and bypass filter installed. So just have to take it one step at a time.

If this truck keeps getting this kind of mileage it will be a nice improvement over the 1500 Dodge. I am hoping that with the bed cover, grill block, and lower air dam extension that I can get this really close to 30 mpg on the highway at 65 mph. Since that is 3-4 mpg higher than my current economy I am very hopeful that I can get there and that would be my objective with the truck. If I can get more than that out of the truck it would just be icing on the cake.

I will post more updates and results as I get more data and make the changes.

Just an update on the progress of the truck. I ordered tonneau cover for the truck to help with the aero situation. I also added(read detracted from the aero) by adding some Weathertech window visors. I don't use the AC and tend to crack my windows when driving down the road. These should cut the wind noise a little bit and allow me to open the windows in the rain to help with fogging.

This weekend I topped up the truck and put in some fuel injector cleaner. Just did an engine flush/oil change and the results were pretty black even with fresh oil with 1000 miles on it. So the engine flush did a job. I am going to keep cleaning and flushing this engine to see if I can get as much gunk out of it as I can. I am just running conventional oil 5w/30 at this point since I know I am doing early oil changes to flush out the gunk. I can tell it has been neglected in the oil filler opening. So I have some work to do. I will run a couple of tanks of gas through it(with injector cleaner) and another flush to get things cleaned up. All this is in an attempt to correct the wrongs of the previous owners and try to level set this thing back to a normal level of performance from new/stock. Once I think I have most of the gunk flushed I will go ahead and mount the oil bypass filter and start the normal routine maint with synthetics.

So I will run some test loops over the next week or two just to put some miles on the truck and let the engine cleaner do it's job. Swapped out the air filter with a new element. I will try to do some baseline runs with the conventional oil and no cover on the truck and try to log the relevant data like the temp, wind direction, speed, number of stops etc to give you some info about the runs.

Fuel economy on the last tank was 269.66 miles on the tank, 10.863 gallons, 24.82 mpg. About 100 miles of this was city driving which of course really hits the fuel economy. I am still figuring out how to drive this in the city as each vehicle has its own preference and behavior which thankfully Ultragauge is helping me to understand.

It will probably be a couple of weeks before I do my next flush and drain depending if I can make my test runs and get some miles and cleaner through that engine. I don't normally drive the truck so I would be doing so mostly as part of these tests. Next update will be when I am ready to move to the synthetics and compare the test runs again. My tonneau has arrived and it is everything I can do to keep me from running out and putting it on! But for the sake of comparison I will wait until I have the data from the unaltered runs. I still have to pick out a route to run. I tried a route this evening after I finished the engine flush/oil change and I don't think that route I tried is going to work. So I have to give this some thought and do some more planning.

What a great first post for me. I also drive a 08' Colorado reg cab with the 4cyl/5sp. I dont do this all the time but when i do, I can consistently get 31-34 mpg on my commute on the days I decide to go 55 mph on the freeway. It also involves coasting as much as i can in neutral. slow take off and plenty of time to stop to a light. I have 18x9 wheels with 275's on all fours. 3/4 drop and an intake. Like you, I want to get a cover for the bed and grill block. and perhaps an extension to the airdam. My wheels poke out about a good 1.5-2 inches past the body.

Josh27, Very cool... Your getting amazing fuel economy already! I haven't slowed down and set the cruise at 55mph to see what this truck does at that speed. I will have to give it a try. You have some very large tires on your truck! What speed are you going in 5th gear at 2k rpm? What tire pressures are you running? Oh, and welcome to the forum!

Each day this week I have jumped in the truck and took it for about a 36 mile loop trying to get the injector cleaner and engine cleaner through the system. I am primarily working on the maint items on the truck at the moment. I will be replacing the plugs, and cleaning the MAF and Throttle body soon. I am considering a bump in tire pressures. The tire max psi is 50 on these tires and that is where I have them, I am considering bumping them to 52 or 55 psi. Also unrelated to the fuel economy I have a full plate of projects that I have to fix or replace on the truck. Just part of the buying a used vehicle experience I guess... I always factor in that I will have to spend some money getting whatever I buy fixed and the way I want it. So those projects are under way also...

Yesterday I finally went out and calibrated my Ultragauge to this truck. It turns out my math calculations were off. I had estimated a difference between the speedo and the actual speed according to the GPS and I was off. So I have been using a factor of 1.0833 for the multiplier to get a number for the miles travelled due to the size of the tires. Well yesterday I used the odometer output from the app on my phone using the GPS and it turns out the factor is a little over 1.11. So my calculations were a little off. So that would mean that last tank of mixed driving would have been about 25.44 mpg. Around town the truck likes to suck the fuel fast! So it took me a few runs to dial in that number so that it is somewhat close and the Ultragauge shows the correct speed and distance in the trip. That will make is a lot easier now to get a read on what is going on now that the gauge is reflecting more true to life numbers. Now I just have to learn how to drive this thing!

Ok, modifications for the day on the truck. I am a big believer in filtration. Air and oil filtration are right at the top of the list. If you want to understand the value and importance of filtration and how it can help I suggest you pop over to the BobistheOilGuy forums and get an education in oil, additives, and filters. So on the filter front I added my Amsoil air filter to the truck today. I don't expect a fuel economy change, but I do expect go get better filtration and a reusable filter that I won't have to toss into a land fill for a very very long time.

Second mod I completed today was a safety issue. When I purchased the truck recently it had a bad seat belt receiver for the drivers seat. The housing was cracked and apparently there was a wiring issue. The seat belt alarm continued to go off even when it was fastened. So I finally got the part, and some massive torx bits to remove the old one and I managed to get that replaced. Mechanics should be called contortionists... I don't know how they do what they do all day... Getting your hands into these small spaces and cutting the tar out of your hands fishing wires into spaces that hands shouldn't be isn't much fun! The good news is that I got it replaced and it now works properly in my initial test in the driveway.

And that is all I have for mods today... :-)

You can toss the steel mesh air filters into a scrap metal bin. Or burn the paper filter.

I really do look forward to the day when products that are produced and sold are specifically made to be completely recycled, or refreshed and used again. It really is a shame that we are forced to waste so much. I prefer the reusable filter if possible, but I am still not happy by the fact that it is made of stuff that will end up in a land fill eventually... Maybe not as soon as the other products, but still soon enough and will not break down. Even my paper filters are still made with plastics and other things that cannot be burned without dumping stuff in the air. That isn't cool. I am into this partially because of the environmental impacts of the choices and actions we take. I would really like to see companies change the focus. How about a "refillable" air filter. You walk into a store, or order the refill online and get just the filter element that you reload/refresh yourself. That is what I am attempting to do with my bypass filter. No more cartridges, but just replace the filter element itself and eliminate so much of the waste. It is a baby step in the right direction but we have a long way to go.

My truck is still on the original factory air filter at 98,000 miles. And it's still good.

Thats cool to hear that your stock filter is holding up. I am hoping the same with this microfiber reusable filter that if I take care of it that it may outlast the vehicle. I guess time will tell. Fingers crossed.

I am not really doing any testing yet, just taking the truck for a spin as often as I can to keep moving the injector cleaner through it and the engine cleaner. I have a route that I have been driving that really isn't going to work for MPG testing, but since I finally have the UG dialed in I slowed down and payed attention tonight. The loop I am driving is 19.3 miles, there is are 16 traffic lights, and the spaces between the lights vary between 45 mph to 65 mph. The drive out on this loop is a climb in elevation of probably 500-800 ft. I am at a higher elevation here so that may be an advantage as far as fuel economy is concerned. Still no real ecomods to the truck, but I kept the speed at 55 on the 65 mph stretches of road and looks like the round trip economy on the UG is reporting a 34.4 mpg. I will try some runs at the PSL and see how that looks and watch the impact to the round trip. Of course it will vary by the number of lights I get stopped at and the amount of traffic. Tonight seemed to move somewhat smoothly even with traffic with only about 3-4 stops each direction for about 6-8 stops. This will at least give me some ideas of what to expect as I move to the next steps in the ecomods.

Right now I am still working to flush a couple tanks of fuel through the truck with cleaner and a another engine flush and oil change once I have completed the fuel cleaning routine before I start the ecomods. Not sure if it will be the synth fluids or the tonneau cover first... I guess I will flip a coin. :-)

Ok, so I am poking around on the truck forums looking for air dam info... OMG, these guys almost alway jerk the factory chin spoiler off the truck as soon as they get them... So I was sitting here scratching my head... WTH? Do I even have the factory chin spoiler on my truck? <runs out to my truck> Well CRUD! I don't have the spoiler on my truck! So first things first I am going to get a replacement OEM spoiler put back on the truck. I just found one for $34 shipped free to the door on eBay. So I went ahead and ordered one. I will do my baseline test without the chin spoiler to see how much of a difference that makes and then decide how much lower than that I should go.

So just thought I would mention it here... I had no idea that the factory spoiler was missing. So this should help a little bit once I get that reinstalled.

What can I say. Most truck guys are idiots.

Since you have a 2wd and I am going to guess you aren't taking it off road much you should put the OEM chin spoiler on there (since you already bought one) but before you do, make it bigger.
Ford added 75mm to their chin spoilers back in 2008 to "help increase fuel economy".

Thanks, I am scanning the truck forums now to see if others have extended it, and if so by how much. I found one guy that made a nice extension on his truck, but it lasted all of 2 days before his driveway ripped it off. Which has me thinking a bit.

I do take the truck off road, but generally driving across my pasture and around my property in MO. But nothing extreme. There is also the snow factor that I am thinking about also. I will start measuring and thinking about how I can do this. Possibly make the extension removable for bad weather or if I find myself in a spot where I need the clearance. I will pick up some landscape edging and start toying with some ideas. I will start by measuring how much clearance I have now going into or exiting out of my driveway... :-)

You may want to devise a way to quickly remove it too. My 9 inch air dam is held on with six 10mm bolts.
I made the lower part of mine out of lawn edging plastic and it has lasted almost 2 years, its getting rough around the bottom and it wouldn't hurt to replace it.

The greatest concentration of people who have added, extended or made their own air dam aka chin spoilers on trucks and SUVs will be found right here.

Well I think all the pieces and parts are here now for the various projects on the truck. I patched up a chipped up spray in liner that had gotten kind of bad with some aerosol spray in bed liner once I hand sanded out the surface rust on the spots that were chipped and rusting. Then I put in a drop in bed liner to try and protect the bed from the elements. I will be putting a tonneau cover over that, but hopefully this will help prevent the rust from coming back and ensure that the bed isn't damaged due to all the work I make the truck do.

I also got the bed rail caps installed today and I have to wrap up the bed liner install with the tailgate cover some time next week. So I think the business end of the truck is getting close to being protected and ready for the eco related mods.

The factory air dam arrived and it is about 3 1/4 inches tall and mounts to a lip that is like 1/2" tall on the bottom of the bumper. The ground clearance with the bumper with no air dam is about 12". According to GM specs the truck has 7.9" of ground clearance. So I need to get the coverage from the air dam of at least 4.3". So I am going to round up and shoot to have at least 5" of coverage from the air dam plus the extension that I will add to the OEM air dam. That would give me about 7" of ground clearance and might be a decent compromise between economy and the ability to still work with the truck off road on my property. I will go back out and do some more measurements to ensure that I am going to be covering all the low hanging parts the best I can with that much coverage of about 5" or possibly 5.5". I will have to double check the measurements.

So my OEM air dam is here, my landscape edging is here, and my stainless bolts, washers, and nylocks are all waiting for me to get some time now. I need to get some more clean highway runs and get a better baseline of economy with the truck with no eco mods. First thing I will install that is eco related is the tonneau cover. I may go ahead next week and install the cover and just roll it up to do the runs and try to do an A-B-A run that way. We will just have to play it by ear and see how the schedule goes. :-)

Last night I cleaned the MAF, and the Throttle Body(TB), and replaced the plugs. MAF and TB looked pretty clean to me, but I scrubbed them up with some cleaner. The plugs however were a different story. A couple of the plugs showed some wear on the electrode so that I think was a needed fix. I didn't get an "Oh man, what a difference" feeling when done. I think it runs slightly smoother than before the cleaning and plugs replacement. Overall the process took 2 hours from beginning to end. Hopefully that will help things a little bit.

Next I have to button up the bed liner(still need to get the tail gate cover on it, and secure the sides with some screws) and get the tonneau cover on it. I will try to get that done this weekend. I had just tossed the bed liner in the back of the truck to get it out of the way of a garage project I have going on so I didn't get a chance to wrap up that install.

The cover is a roll up cover so I should be able to do some before and after comparison runs. I am curious to see how this truck behaves with the changes.

Finished buttoning up the drop in bed liner and I don't like one of the compromises that I had to make. My truck came with a factory tailgate cap/spoiler that extended the top of the tailgate width by about 1.5-2 inches so it was about 4 inches wide on the top and is there to help with economy. The drop in liner has a tailgate panel that extends over the top of the tailgate. They mention they know about the tailgate spoiler and made a dotted line across the tailgate panel where you can cut it off so that it wouldn't interfere with the tailgate spoiler. Looking at it I just couldn't see how that was going to be adequately secure nor did it appear it was going to work as well at protecting the tailgate. So I flipped a coin and removed the tailgate spoiler and just installed the bedliner panel.

I hope that removing that cap/spoiler isn't going to be a significant hit in my attempt to improve the trucks aero and fuel economy on the highway. I guess I will find out soon enough. I am not happy about that compromise. I will see if I can get some time to get the tonneau on the truck this weekend and see how it goes from there. If I can figure out how to post some pics I will post what this frankentruck looks like and what I am doing.

Update: Made my loop out of the city and back and saw 30.1 mpg up hill run with a tailwind, and 33.9 back downhill with a headwind keeping it at 55 mph. The wind factor is a variable that I haven't seen on the few previous runs, but the traffic was flowing and no hold ups due to traffic, just had to slow or stop for lights. So it is hard to tell if there is any real difference with the MAF/TB/plugs cleaning and change and the tailgate cap removal. Right now I would have to say it looks like the change is negligible, but will be able to tell more after a few more runs watching it.

Another out of city loop and back today. 28.4 mpg on the trip out(up hill) at 55 mph top speed, sadly I had 7 stops I was hit with flakey lights and just horrible timing. On the trip back the average picked up to 34.3 mpg at 55 mph and only had to stop at 1 light on the way back. So far the pattern in fuel economy on that loop has been fairly consistent other than when I choose bad time to go and get caught in traffic.

So I am a little concerned this truck isn't going to make my target 30mpg at 65 when I am averaging about that at 55mph. I am not sure mods are going to help me pick up the difference in FE. So it is time to just get on with the mods and lets see if I am going to hit my targets or not. Tonight I installed the tonneau cover on the truck. I have been waiting for some time to get that on the truck and it feels good to finally have it on. I will make some runs this week on my out of city loop and see if the FE improves.

Next weekend if time permits I will get my air dam mod done and see how that affects things the following week. I have to get some materials for the grill block soon. Right now based on what I have seen from other peoples mods it looks like the best case scenario I can expect between the cover, air dam, and grill block looks like I might make 29.5 mpg best case at 65mph. Not quite what I was hoping for so I will just have to be patient and see what happens and then decide the next steps once I get there.

Well I decided to just go ahead and try to extend the factory OEM air dam so that it would extend low enough to provide some cover for the low hanging bits on the truck. I don't understand GM at all on this air dam. Why would you add an air dam that comes no where near low enough to provide coverage under the truck? It is a 3.25 inch high dam that only about 2.75 inches extend below where the stock bump lip hangs down. GM states the ground clearance is 7.9 inches. I show about 12 inches to the bottom of the front bumper. So the factory air dam comes no where near covering the low hanging parts.

So I extended the factory air dam by about 3 inches. Working with the lawn edging is no fun and it didn't want to conform to the factory air dam without puckering up. So I tried to address this by using bolts and nuts every couple of inches with a washer. That helped a lot with the puckering, but now the bolts look horrible. So I slapped some gorrilla tape over it and that looks just as bad. So I give up, it just will look bad until I can think of better solution. All those bolts and washers were MEGA overkill, but I knew that double sided tape wasn't going to cut it. So I will have to give this some thought if I decide to revamp this thing.

So I went ahead and mounted the dam up and I have about 7.5 inches of ground clearance. So I think that should cover the low hanging parts and help somewhat with the FE. We will see. Hopefully I will get some time tomorrow to see how the combo of the tonneau cover and the air dam affect my FE.

Ok, my out of city loop/segment today was my first with the air dam and the tonneau cover. The truck cuts through the air much easier. Much easier to accel and hold speed. Looks like about 1.5 with those two mods together. Trip out 29.4 mpg, trip back average climbed to 34.9 mpg. Of course lots of variables with lights, traffic etc as usual, you never know what your going to get. This was once again at 55 mph on the open stretches of the road.

So now I need to get some ABS plastic ordered for the grill block and see where that takes this. Let me see if I can get some pics taken and posted here so you guys can see what has been done so far.

Interesting to watch the tonneau in the wind and where I see the air pressure pushing down on the cover. Makes me wish for a cab spoiler to move that air further back and provide less turbulance.

I am posting pics below from Google Photo's, but they are not showing up:
https://goo.gl/photos/E4DDmpsWJNZGm2YD9
https://goo.gl/photos/PsSzGJXQNBkeMDmA9
https://goo.gl/photos/8z759aBbZ64ZsA2V8
https://goo.gl/photos/PxAgzACiHXXB7TPx7
https://goo.gl/photos/aajygtsdBRskQwmVA

Let's try it below by URL link:
https://goo.gl/photos/aajygtsdBRskQwmVA
https://goo.gl/photos/PxAgzACiHXXB7TPx7
https://goo.gl/photos/8z759aBbZ64ZsA2V8
https://goo.gl/photos/PsSzGJXQNBkeMDmA9
https://goo.gl/photos/E4DDmpsWJNZGm2YD9

Ok, I posted pics to Google photos and copied the URL for those into this post, but I don't see them showing up. Not sure what I did wrong... :-(

Today was probably as close as I am going to get to a perfect fuel economy run on the loop I drive to test my mods. I had to stop at a grand total of 1 light the entire trip out and back. I did have to slow down to time the lights and only had to "almost" stop at one light. So that is as perfect as it gets I think for this loop I am testing on. The results:

Trip out: 32.2 mpg
Trip back: 38.2 mpg
Speed on highway segments: 55 mph

That is the best fuel economy I have gotten and not likely that I will match it again given how hard it is to make the trip without traffic and the lights hanging you up.

My ABS for the grill block finally arrived. I will try to get that on the truck soon so I can do a few more tests before my next road trip in the truck in October where I will see how close I was able to get to my stated goal of 30 mpg at 65 mph on that trip. That will be about 2000 miles round trip so that will be the real objective here with this truck and one of the reasons I downsized to a smaller truck like this.

When you look at your mileage, make note of elevation change, temperature, wind strength, and wind direction.

I find that an elevation change of 800 feet in 72 miles makes a difference of 4 to 5 MPG depending whether I'm going uphill or downhill. The seasonal changes in MPG in my gas log are almost all temperature because wind mostly averages out, although today's fill was unusually good because I had almost all tailwinds.

Thanks for mentioning the elevation difference. I just looked up the elevation for the two locations. I live in Colorado Springs at 6035ft and the location I drive out to before I turn around it is at 6818ft. So it is almost 800ft elevation change. I agree wind normally averages out over time. I am about to put gas in the truck for the first time since all these changes so I will finally have some data to put in the fuel log here.

Hopefully I will have the upper grill block on the truck next weekend.