World's Worst Mileage?

Now for heaven's sake, folks...

...don't start feeling all jilted. I still love you all.

And yes-- I pressed my reset button the very next time I drove the car. Which was August 17th. (Look, I'm serious when I tell you I've been staying in and working under an incredibly pressing writing deadline.)

AND...I printed up blank driving records. Formatted 'em as a table and everything. Date; From (location); Time; To (location); Time; Odometer @ end; MPG shown @ end; Fillup Date; Odometer @ Fillup; Gallons Filled; and Notes (like traffic, AC on or off, etc.). I clipped the blanks to a board and put them in the car along with a pen.

Since then, I've kept scrupulous records of every trip. And I've kept my mouth shut because I wanted to collect enough data for it to be useful before weighing in again. Didn't want to waste everyone's time by jumping the gun. Jimmyhua suggested that 100 miles might be a good benchmark. So far I've gone all of 42 miles, in 19 trip segments. Really short segments. Market, Target, news stand, hardware store. And in pretty dense midday Hollywood traffic.

Also, I sort of didn't want to get yelled at for not having the different exact priorities that various different people insist I should have. I made my job my priority. I had to.

So, to Rancid13 and to Godiva: Yes, the problem was serious enough that I pressed the reset button right away. (Thought I'd already agreed I would; sorry if that wasn't clear.) As for "serious enough" for a 30+ minute test drive-- nope, mileage isn't trumping work right now. Though I sure wish it could.

I'l be pretty darn happy when I have the freedom and leisure to take a good long road cruise. I'm curious to see what happens, and I'll be keeping careful records. While my biggest interest is still whether or not I get reasonable mileage for the kind of travel I actually do, it will be interesting--and telling, and even fun--to see what happens when I try other people's travel patterns. At least it'll tell me how my car's performance compares with people who drive differently. (And actually, once this work project is done, my pattern will most likely return to a much more typical mix of long and short trips, and of a lot more driving every day.)

Meanwhile, this is why I've been especially interested in what people were getting who do have similar patterns, however unusual those may be. Yeah, my travel these past weeks isn't going to tell anyone how I stack up against the largest pool of drivers. Eventually my travel will come much closer to that. But some things have always been atypical. For instance, while I drive between 12,000 and 18,000 miles a year, I've rarely had a daily commute. And I drive in and around Los Angeles-- a city that can be something of a hybrid in itself. Huge parts of L.A. are sort of urban and sort of suburban and sometimes even semi-rural all in one place. I live in a wildfire zone less than a mile from Graumann's Chinese Theater. Go figure.

To DaveSheremata: Thanks for the suggestion about the calendar screen. Wow--this car can do so much, and I've barely scratched the surface of all those screens. (And if anyone does scratch my screen...watch out.)

To nateprius: Thanks; definitely not driving in B.

And to all, here's at least a quick preview of my results so far. But like I said, I've only been able to put 42 miles on the car since that reset. (I do still know my odometer miles at the latest fillup, so I'll do a manual calculation next time.):

Lots of really short segments-- 19 total-- from <1 mile to 5 miles-- in pretty much heavy midday Hollywood traffic. Travel rounds range from 3 to 6 segments. Stops between segments range from 10 to thirty minutes, with one stop of 90 minutes. I have the exact numbers for each trip...but so far this is all the data I have to work with.

The mpg news (so far) may be sort of good, but this is all so early. Time will tell. (Okay, time and distance.) (Okay-- time, distance, speed, weight, traffic, weather, tires, etc. I know.) At reset, the mpg reading became 46.6. After the first short (<1 mile), trafficky segment, it was 43.9. In subsuquent segments (remember--all short, mostly all trafficky) it adjusted to 37.2, 36.3, 30.2, 34.2, 34.3, 33.5, 31.8, 32.4, 30,1, 32.1, 32.3, 32.3, 31.1, 32.0, 31.9, 31.8, 30.9.

That a distinct improvement over the 23 and change I was getting before the reset and under similar traffic and travel pattterns. There was one important difference that would affect mileage: before the reset, I was using AC pretty consistently for several weeks. After the reset, the weather was cool enough that I had the AC off, except for a portion of the very last segment (which was <3 miles).

So we'll see what happens when I know more. When I really have something to work with. Meanwhile, thanks for all you're been doing for me.

And please don't yell at me. I respect you all, and hope you'll remember that even though my needs, my availability and my travel pattern may be different from yours, our cars are all the same.

So we're all in this together.

Again, thanks! This little stop has been the one break in my drudgery today, as I am, currently,

more Lost In The Work than Lost In The Hills.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(picarsic @ Aug 24 2006, 03:52 PM) [snapback]309033[/snapback]</div>

Gosh...it's a provocative thought...but right now I just don't think it could be anything that major. (Certainly not a lemon in the lemon-law sense-- a car that needs to be replaced.)

So much will depend on my getting enough good data now--and of course on whatever I can learn from Toyota, if the raw numbers don't answer the questions first. But what little I have collected so far--and all that I've been learning here-- feels like it's pointing me away from lemon and toward a few other most-likely areas:

I may discover that some aspect of my driving habits, conditions, patterns is at a much more extreme, far end of the curve of what's typical than I realized. Like my current infrequent driving, short trips, traffic, etc. It could be way off the scale, while I'd assumed it was merely close to one end.

It may come from a quirk in how the car--without malfunctioning--does its calcualtion. As you see in the thread, the matter of how the calculations do and don't reset is of particular interest. (And that's the area I'm following most right now, since resetting the thing.) In that case, I could actually have been doing better that it was reading. (One or two manual averages when I refuel would help identify that.)

It could be a computer glitch that needs reprogramming or replacing or something like that. (Again, the manual average would help, here.)

Anyway, until I can get out and around more (and boy, do I want to), those are the areas I'd put money on.

Of course if I do put money on those, it'll guarantee that it turns out to be a live mouse in the engine.

L.I.T.H.

Darn it. I just did what I wasn't gonna to do. Spun my wheels in idle speculation. Sorry, all. (But I didn't want to ignore your note, picarsic...and it just got me thinking about what my guesses are.)