Torque app accuracy?
 

i recently got a elm 327 adapter and hooked it up to my 4dr civic with auto trans along with a Torque app on my android phone.

It's showing about 45 mpg at steady 50 mph and i averaged 52 mpg on some recent trips with a warmed up engine. This seems too high for me ( i know the next fillup will tell me the truth but that will be in about a week) because i was getting about 40mpg with my other civic 5speed with lots of EOC. i never got to test the app with my old civic so i can't compaire them.

I heard about this on the Camaro forums. And as far as horsepower goes, I heard it was inaccurate by 5-7%. So it gives more of an in-the-ballpark idea. Fuel economy may or may not be in the same boat.

the way these programs calculate fuel consumption is based on reading sensors and calculating around a stoich mixture. the only truly accurate way to measure fuel consumption is to measure the injector pulse, and know exactly what injectors you have. but, manufacturers are not too keen on letting the general public dig into their computer controls to get the raw data.

i find the torque app measures slightly lower efficiency for my car. if it says 35 mpg i actually get 37 mpg. there is a way to callibrate it in the vehicle type menu. i use torque daily. One problem i have with the program is the logging feature. I downloaded a log and opened it in excel and it logs actual codes not values. it is unreadable to me.

Go into settings, then adaptor settings, make sure the Enhanced MPG calculation option is checked. This helped on my Kia. This app is not perfect, but it is a very cheap way to clear codes and see some of whats going on with a car. I dont regret my purchase.

Make sure you've got the paid version. First, Ian deserves his $5 (or whatever it is now) for putting that together and second, the free version doesn't get so much of his development time. Unfortunately things like mpg at the accuracy we need aren't really high on his List of Things To Do, but with the free version you'llbe getting his second-best.

I'm sure the longer its out, the better it will get.

I'm considering getting a mini tablet and putting it in my dash so i can use it as a stereo/ engine code reader, and a way to read my fuel economy. so for now i'll just sit on the sidelines and see how it goes.

so today i filled up and i was suprised that i averaged 34mpg (without any major hypermiling) the first tank with this car because i thought the automatic trans would really hurt gas mileage. So i guess the torque app is pretty acurate, i will never know for sure because i only turn it on once in a while because it's hard to get it started when i'm in a hurry.

-I'm taking a long trip and will be measuring the accuracy of this app.
-One thing that I did for the MPG instant reading is set the limit to I believe 115mpg (which is a little beyond what the reading goes to while coasting), because sometimes it jumps to the max (255mpg), and I think that this skews the average MPG reading.
-I will be comparing the fuel used figure to the amount of fuel that it takes to fill the tank up again, and will also be comparing the trip distance figure to that of the car's computer. Then using all of this data to see how accurate the MPG reading is to the individual readings of the app, and the actual MPG.
-As for the accuracy of the app, as detailed in the Torque forum, during some of the update intervals, one user noted that no fuel was logged as being used, so this would increase the recorded MPG usage, and decrease the recorded fuel usage.

With apps like these, you're really limited by the fact that they have to run on a phone and share processor and port time with other phone apps and the OS. I tried running a few for track work and the dog slow GPS update time made it an unreliable way of getting data compared to a dedicated GPS device.

Good for ballpark figures, though.