adjusting the nut did'nt help much.
 

I got my scan gauge, did a partial grill block, and drove by the scangauge increasing speed slowly, staying under 65 mph most of the time, coasting some ,drafting some, after 2 tanks thru my 2002 echo sedan using the gauge. i am dissaponted by my results. only 1-2 mpg more, i was hoping to get up where some of you guys are, i went from 44mpg to 46 one tank and 45 the next,, and i get 42-44 driving with no thoughts for milage. my commute is 105 miles a day to work and back 70% 45mph zone 20% 55-65 mph zone, 10% 25-35 mph slight traffic ,about 10 traffic lights. What am i not getting here,(i tried hard to keep the mpg up high on the scangauge),how do i get over 50 mpg? or can i in this toyota echo 5 speed, no ac no power steering.

You may not have been driving bad in the first place. I don't have the EPA estimates for your car, so I can't tell.

I feel like I'm in the same boat... I just don't know what I'm doing wrong. I've tried following everyone's advice and it doesn't help noticeably.

from what I have read at another post here, winter gas can contribute to less mpg....maybe 10% worse.....

It's a difficult time of year to test ecomods. Everybody's fuel economy is falling with the onset of winter. Weaker gas, thicker air, thicker oils and greases, colder tires, colder engines, and many other conditions contribute.

One of my favorite add-a-gauges for the SG is the trip fuel consumption gauge, which shows you how many gallons of fuel you burned since you last started the car. My commute would burn 0.35-0.45 gal, and I looked at it every day to see how well I was doing. Overall, monitoring my fuel consumption enabled me to improve it.

This time of year, the goal isn't to increase MPG, but to reduce its decline.

Your commute is mostly 45MPH zone, is there a lot of traffic there? And, what speed do you drive that zone in, and what gear?

Have you tried pulse and gliding, or using EOC?

Also, check your tire pressure, put it up near the sidewall maximum.

I believe you are probably missing EOC, that is the only way I know of to get your FE significantly above epa.

Also what gear are you in during the 45mph zones? You should try to maintain the highest gear possible. Pulse and glide might be applicable in the 10% area below 35mph if you are willing to coast down enough and keep the motor off.

Also you need to allow your speed to increase and decrease while going over hills, try to keep your FE the same throughout hills if you can.

And believe it or not one identical car from another can get significantly different FE depending on the motor, drivetrain and tires, my DOdge crewcab 1500 is rated at 20mpg but I can't achieve more than 18 driving EXTREMELY sporadic and only 15.5mpg driving normally. I am told it needs a tune up though that had no effect.

Cheers
Ryan

EOC is, in my experience, not the only way to get one's FE significantly above EPA estimates. I've never used EOC with any of my vehicles. Nor do I P&G, DWL or draft. The only time I ever got under highway EPA with my Mustang was when I ran it in the "barn" to charge the battery during its first Winter.
YMMV:confused:

moonmonkey -

I have a *hunch* that the Echo could use some aeromods. I think others on the forum will say that cars like the Geo Metro and Toyota Echo are not as efficient at freeway speeds as other cars. They are MPG champs in the city, but not as much on the freeway.

CarloSW2

My guess is that your route is already optimized. 105 miles a day with a majority of it at 45 mph is a good sweet spot. That's not to say you can't do better. Concentrate on techniques with the other 30%. Timing the lights, reading the lay of the land (uphill/downhill) and being at the right speed for the 25-30 mph section.

I've found that the posted speed limits have you at a terrible rpm range for good FE. Plus or minus 5 mph can make a big difference.

Most of all just keep at it. It takes time to figure it all out. Small will eventually turn into big numbers.

At 44 mpg you're already at 137.5% EPA rating for the car. Thats really pretty good. If you want to hit the really high numbers, you have to either look at going slower, serious aeromods, or pulse and glide. Sounds like you weren't a bad driver to begin with. :)

You can also try accelerating a bit harder. I use the "LOD" function on the scangauge and keep it around 80 while accelerating. Do that, and keep your rpm under 2000.

It also just takes time too. Look at my fuel log in the Paseo for instance. Its just a gradual incline as I learn how to better use all the techniques available.

Agreed. It's not alchemy, but there is a lot of art as well as science in maximizing F/E.

I don't EOC, but I still get good F/E for my vehicle. "Staying under 65 mph most of the time", might not be enough. Try for all of the time. I found this to be a really big part of my overall F/E. People really underestimate how much fuel is used above 60 mph, and also creeping around in parking lots, and stopping and starting in traffic. If you have to use your brake in traffic, you're probably going too fast. Let the other cars accelerate past you and then wait at the light, and as you coast up behind them and keep going without hitting your brake or jamming on the accelerator, most times you find it's the same cars at every light. They're getting horrible F/E, and not making any faster progress than you are. This is a lot of where the artistry comes in.

Don't make any final conclusions after 2 tanks. You can't do 10 push-ups a day for a week and expect to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

If I understood the post rightly, one problem might be trying to drive by the ScanGauge fuel consumption indicator. I've had one in the Insight for several years, and my experience has been that the SG fuel consumption indication is very slow to respond at best (so you'd often be "behind the curve" if you try to follow it), and sometimes just plain wrong.

50 mpg is certainly possible in an MT Echo. Keep your speeds to 55 mph or lower, and you may have to P&G.

I've tried EOC in my '88 Escort a few times, but since it has DFCO I've never seen any increase in FE. As some others said this is not the time of year to be looking for great FE since winter blend gas isn't as good and cars simply don't get as good mileage during the winter.

Ford Man: Engine Off Coasting isn't strictly a replacement for Deceleration Fuel Cut Off.

Coasting to a stop with the engine off is definitely more efficient than DCFO to a stop (because the coast is longer).

I guess whether it's slow or not depends which gauge you're using . Tank average? Slow to change (unless you just filled & reset). Trip average? Depends on trip length. Instant? Not slow, by definition!

Like Robert: I have the TRIP mpg up as one of my gauges, along with instant MPG - because I drive with load (DWL) a lot, and use instant to stick to a target MPG on the open road.

As Daox says, you're already doing decently. Without seeing your driving first hand, I'd guess the remaining big gains are to be found on the freeway portion (by slowing down, or taking an alternate slower route), and in the "light traffic and 10 stoplights" portion where your anticipation, momentum preservation and EOC opportunities come up, and a bunch of unavoidable hard stops can flush 50 mpg pretty quickly. (Pulse and glide is a potential tool too, if you're comfortable/skilled enough to do it safely in a way that doesn't negatively affect other drivers.)

Bad definition :-) It's the SG's "instant" mpg display (or the gallons per hour variety). Compare it to the instant display of the Insight (and I suppose any other car that has one), and you'll see that its response is far from instant. A good example is when you're driving down a level road in conditionw where the Insight spends most of its time in lean burn mode, but drops out every couple of minutes to do the purge of the secondary catalyst. You'll feel it happening, and see the Insight's display drop from around 75-100 mpg to 50-60 mpg. The SG won't even notice. You can also be getting 75+ mpg per Insight display with 50 mpg showing on the SG. (The Insight figures are backed up by trip miles & fillups.)

The SG's a neat piece of work, but in my experience all the fuel consumption-related displays are more like wild guesses than actual measurements. IIRC, the SG makers even admit this: they don't measure fuel consumption directly, but infer it from other OBDII measurements.

The reason the numbers between the insights FCD and the Scangauge don't match up is because of the lean burn.

The scan gauge doesn't monitor weather you are in lean burn or not. so it bases its calculations on a air/fuel ratio of 14.7:1 and assumes that this number does not change.

mtgeekman -

That's what I was thinking. The SG is a (very good) Jack-Of-All-Trades, so it doesn't do as well with cars that employ special MPG strategies like lean-burn.

If the OBDII protocol had specified some kind of (averaged?) fuel injector pulse-width, or just a plain instant-MPG parameter, then the SG would be more accurate. However, that would have made cheaper copy-cats more accurate too, so the "luster" of the SG would not be as great.

CarloSW2

True. The SG doesn't speak "lean burn" in its MPG calcs. MPGuino does, however.

Yeah, that's what I said :-) It's not actually measuring fuel consumption, it's making guesses, which sometimes turn out to be wrong. Then there's another issue when trying to drive by its computed number: the response is too slow.

The experience of detailed monitoring seems to be one full of crests and valleys IMHO. I am still thinking of an SG to monitor other items (mainly temps) but I will use the built in MPG monitor for, well, MPG. Its hard to gauge how well I may be doing. Last tank (I haven't driven much for the last month or so) is a case in point.

1st half of the tank I hypermiled (as much as you can on country roads in hills) - speed down to under 60, experimented with strong vs gentle hill climbing, glided (engine on, I may ask a question about this in a moment) where possible, no overtaking and so on. After returning (200 miles) my tank showed about 1/3 used - normally it would be 1/2 by this point so I knew I was doing well, but the built-in average MPG for the tank only showed 45 (imp).

2nd half of the tank involved 85+ (disclaimer - not true officer) on the M6 down south to do the in-laws. So it drained the rest of the tank in 230 miles - which I thought was OK as my tanks normally last about 400. (200 + 230 > 400). But my average MPG for the second half of the tank still said 45. Hmmm.

When I filled it was better, > 50.

Still Mrs A was impressed with the fact my tank had lasted longer (hey baby ;-) ) but not convinced of the overall benefits.

As for blending I think Diesel gets some additional anti-waxing stuff over winter which may affect mileage. I've noticed some stations offer a "better" (aka more expensive) version so once I drain this tank down to the beeper I may experiment with a tank of the premium stuff to work out if that works.

Before this though my tanks showed little improvement so it takes practice and lots of it. The more you know the route that helps a lot, and where you don't you get to spot patterns in the junctions and hold-ups which can help a lot too.

Keep at it, I want to get my improvement up too.

Adjusting the nut.. What exactly do you guys mean by this?

You are the nut behind the wheel. Make some adjustments to your driving style, and you'll see big fuel economy improvements.

haha oh nice

I have to say, I am a visual person and I have done much better on the freeway with the Q45 (4.5L v8) than I did with the 97 Toyota Avalon (3.0L V6). I credit that with the video style mpg display that is part of the car. There is a instant bar graph and a continuous digital dispaly in the same screen. On longtrips, if I'm at 24.8 avg mpg, for example, I'll start trying to get it to 25mpg. In thew Avalon, there was no mpg gauge and i never got better than 26mpg on the road. I have gotten 27mpg on the bigger infiniti. And I probably NEVER would have gotten that without the constant feedback while driving.

...statistics upon a "...sample of one..." are notoriously bad.

still no big change
 

im on my 4th fill-up thru the newly scangauged echo, it really makes only a small difference no matter how i drive it, maybe 2-3 mpg top's. i am doing some aero mods now, to try to get above 50mpg . maybe 44-46 is all ill get on my particular commute , i live in an outskirt of jacksonville fl, and there is no route option that would get me off of 55-65 highway , i could'nt do it anyway it already takes me from 1-1/4 to 1-1/2 hours to get home so driving slower is not an option, thus the aero mods, but ill also keep tring to learn this scangauge thanks for all the responces.

Yer still kicking my butt! But I have a Civic Si. I can get anywhere from 28 with a real heavy foot, to around 37 in the summer working hard at it.

slurp you have 750 more pounds and .5 liter larger motor(thats alot more car)
i am just learning this scangauge ,i am now making it a personal challenge to end each trip with 50+ showing ,by tring to always keep the instantanious mpg above the average mpg,,im able to do that on almost all my commutes unless its a very short trip, im half way thru a tank (according to my cars fuel gauge) so by wendsday ill know if the scangauge and actual milage are the same. according to most posts ive seen the scangauge is a few mpg's to optimistic. also 37 mpg is not bad!

Moonmonkey,

If you're like a lot of us, you'll learn to ignore other traffic, and just go your speed. Going 55 instead of 65 might cost you 15 minutes, but it might also be worth 10 mpg.

My SE-R's got slurp's weight, and a full liter larger engine than your Echo. I'm averaging more than Slurp's best tanks in it. It's largely a matter of discipline, although having good driving conditions helps a lot.

your xb is the same car as my echo just heavier and less aerodynamic how do you get such high mpg you must be driving below 60 mph alot??

60 is my top speed. I drove my xB 7200 miles cross-country 2 months after I bought it, and learned what it liked and didn't like on that trip. It hits a brick wall aerodynamically at 60 mph. If I drive it 70 mph, I get 32 mpg. If I drive 55 mph, I get about 42 mpg. But if I P&G on low-traffic volume backroads between 60 and 50 mph, I can get 48 mpg. Add long downhills and no traffic (where I can glide safely to 35-40 mph, and I can get 52 mpg.

On low speed 40 mph country roads, I can top 60 mpg.

My goal is to hit 30 MPG in my Tempo, but so far the best I've ever done was a 26 MPG tank. Before installing the rear undertray and diffuser, I drove without paying attention to mileage and got a 23 MPG tank. The new EPA combined is 21, so it seems my modifications have helped to a degree.

But a +100 mile daily commute? Ouch. My commute to and from school is 40 miles daily, with 35 miles on a 55 highway and 5 miles in city traffic.

That's an easily achievable goal, if your car isn't saddled with a V-6 engine. Accelerate gently (if it's an AT), and keep your speed at or below 55. In the city, coast as much as possible, and shut the engine off at stoplights.

I wouldne be so hard on yourself.

The fact that you gained at all in this colder then average winter is showing that you are doing something. I have lost 1-2mpg+ on EVERY vehicle I drive (2 for work and our personal 2 cars) due to winter fuel and winter related factors. A lot more stations are also selling Ethanol enriched fuels and they do get worse MPG.

In the winter a car is running a much richer fuel curve when cold and it runs in "Open Loop" longer. Open loop is where it is not adjusting fuel mixture with the O2 sensor just a fuel map related to engine temperature, outside air temp and throttle. The oils are heavier due to the cold as well.
Most engine oils are designed to be at 200f operating temp. Gear oils in the diffs and manual transmission around 100-140f. Auto trans around 180f. It takes a LOT longer in the winter to achieve those temps where the engine and running gear is at its peak efficiency. Even synthetics will have some of the same problems.