An audiophile and petrolhead's musings: Does life seem worthwhile to you? Here's how to order! - Page 41

My POS commuter car has a 6-speed auto - it seems very "shifty" to me - I barely touch the throttle and it shifts, which is rather annoying on the freeway. I find that I can get 2-5 mpg better per tank by locking it into 6th when I'm cruising. There is still enough torque to allow me to overtake slower cars. Makes me wonder what the engineers were thinking. I suspect it is somehow related to the federal mpg testing - the cars are optimized for those test scenarios so they can advertise the mpg, and if that doesn't match the real world, too bad. This car (Hyundai Elantra) is well known to get nowhere near it's rating of 40 mpg on the highway. If I'm careful, I can get no better than ~33 mpg, which is about average according to the Elantra forums. If I'm NOT careful (ie, how I really drive), I get ~29-30 mpg for almost pure highway cruising.

You should be happy you even get that kinda millage lol :). Here it's mostly stop and go and even when on the Highway it's usually climbing a hill or mountain so there goes that millage. My car is rated at 27 Highway and 18 in the City. I tend to be averaging around 16. Now if I was to drive down to Ha'ula (Turtle Bay side) I could very well get 30+.
 

I think that's exactly it. My older car (as in an actual car) only has a 4-speed (and 4 is OD), and rarely hunts gears (for the most part it just picks a gear and stays in it, unless you gun it, or decide you want to climb Everest (and in both cases the owner's manual prescribes turning OD off, and indeed, if you do that it will absolutely behave (it stops trying to "cruise")); my newer SUV (it's an '04 with a V6) is 5 or 6 (I forget, too lazy to go pull the VIN just for this discussion) and each gear is incredibly short until it gets up into top (a lot like your Hyundai I'm assuming), and it gets *terrible* fuel economy (relative to its sticker, and relative to the old boat) by contrast. And it doesn't help that my truck is an FFV, because E85 gets even worse economy than gas. It's more of a slap in the face "yeah this gets horrible economy, but it can use cheaper fuel that performs even worse, but it's slightly cheaper!"

And while I'm lamenting burning through gas at an insane rate, I have to remember that I rarely actually drive. So sure it costs me $50-$60 for a tank of gas, but I do that monthly or thereabouts. I wish my car had like a 50 gallon tank, so I could just fuel quarterly.
Edited by obobskivich - 10/12/12 at 11:06am

Yeah - rub it in - I'm filling up 2-3 times per week. I pay out more regularly than any casino slot machine...

I'm thinking of mounting a mast & sail to the top of my car to catch some of the onshore breeze. I think it would work fine, except that I would need to tack back and forth across the lanes of the freeway. Comin' about!

Yeah the ethanol crap makes things worse and the car runs funky. Lacks combustion which results in the engine bogging down lol and loss of gas millage....

lol.

You fuel less than most people I know who seriously drive/commute (I know a few people who fuel daily). If that makes it any better.


If the engine is designed for it, it will run fine. It's just less efficient per gallon, because there's less energy in the fuel. Again, with an FFV, the fuel sensor should make appropriate adjustments (just like how EFI engines with MAF will adjust for altitude, fuel richness, etc - it's just more sophisticated then that, but not all the way to a gas turbine (which will drink anything that burns)). You shouldn't be dumping E85 into a normal gasoline engine.

This isn't the same as Ethanol additives to fuel, which is designed to reduce smog. Modern cars (I don't even know how "old" that includes, I know my '88 is included, but I also know it was pretty advanced for it's era (it's one of the first Ford vehicles to have direct-port EFI as far as I understand)) should be designed to handle up to 10% Ethanol for this, but that doesn't make them suitable for running E85. I've not observed a substantial decrease in fuel economy running 10% (it's "up to 10%" but generally is not actually 10%, it can be much lower) - I have no idea what it does for emissions (I know my car, despite being ancient, is actually pretty clean according to the state emissions tests (I have a few years of records too), I'd be curious to see what a classified PZEV or LEV benches out like in comparison, but I know that I'm ahead of a lot of mid 1990s economy cars that were just starting to see EFI, despite having an *ancient* design that Ford just up and decided to drop an EFI manifold onto, because "oh look, computers!").

Yeah, I feel you. My daily driver was a 1997 Tahoe, with a bad distributer mind you. She ran VERY rich  luckily i fixed that, now that car is my sisters problem. Funny thing about old solid steel american cars, she ran into a car in a parking lot, did $4000 damage to the car, scuffed a small 2 inch part of the bumper on the tahoe. Pretty much bullet proof.

I never thought I'd see the day where a 1997 Tahoe classified as an "old solid steel American car" - really.

Haha, it's all perspective. ;) I'm more used to the new stuff

Is that a 5-speed or 6-speed in the Mini? Looks like that story ended well after a dubious beginning.

 

And you're still in one piece?   

 

 

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