Pop Quiz -- Horrible MPG

I'll add my voice to the cacoffiny and suggest that you were going very slowly (< 7 MPH, since there was no regen), probably caught in traffic. AND, since you're from OR, you couldn't take a little cold, so you had the heat on full blast

Plus, you had a bike rack on the car and were towing a horse trailer. Yeah. That should cover it.

 

Hmmm. How about... You had a flat tire, no spare and were limping along the road looking for a place to get it fixed? I'm assuming that the flat tire doesn't fall in the realm of "nothing wrong with the car". Perhaps thats a bit of a reach, eh? If not that, then I'm throwing my guess in the ring with the really heavy, stop-and-go, cold-weather traffic votes.

 

I going with cold weather, road was ice from side to side, going very slow, in B, down hill, defrost on high, and maybe foot out the door for further breaking!

 

The hell with the 15 MPG, how did you get the 100MPG? It must have been a long down hill. The 15 MPG resulted when you go up hill in stop and go traffic with the lights, heater, defoster and deicer on.

 

I can hold 100 mpg for about 10 minutes on my way home usually, due to downhills. There are a few uphill portions, but these are small enough that I can usually coast through them and regain speed going downhill. There's one particular hill that, if I'm doing 55 at the top of the hill, if I coast down, I can reach (depending on weather conditions) up to 73 mph. It's only about 30-45 seconds down the hill, but it's fairly steep. Obviously, it sucks going back up that hill in to work. I'll try to remember to bring a camera tomorrow and take a picture of the MFD.

 

ive seen this before in my car. stop and go, mostly in EV but with defrost on causing the ICE to run 90% of the time. and you are right, in warm weather without defrost, you will be at 99.9 most of the time

 

I see that the outside temp was 34 so that didn't help much with the heater cranking. You said you get about 100MPG on that road so you must be talking about going down hill. I guess you were going the opposite way that time in bad traffic with the heater on high and the music up loud.
That's just my guess.

 

by his post, i think we can eliminate a change in direction.

 

My vote is for towing the hummer...

 

How about there was little traffic so you were driving 80 mph and people were moving out of your way. You couldn't coast (below 40mph) so your ICE was on the whole time (and it was cold).

 

Well?????????

The suspense is killing me.

 

Did that occur on the day it snowed in Portland last week?

 

He took three members of the visiting Japanese Sumo team on a trip to Mt. Hood. On the way back to Portland the traffic was backed-up and it was snowing hard. Because of the stop and go traffic, the snowplows couldn't remove the accumulated ten inches of snow . . . but with the three Sumo dudes plus Bill, his Prius was riding very low and was acting like a proxy snow plow for everyone behind him. And yes, the defroster was on . . . Sumo wrestlers tend to fog car windows. :mellow:

 

I'll make some guesses.

Driven 93 miles for 40.2 mpg

Divide miles driven by mpg to get total gas used

93miles/40.2mpg=2.313 gals

Define:

x=miles (during 30 min period)
93-x=miles(driven outside 30 min period)

Assume:

15 mpg during 30 min period
50 mpg otherwise (probably optimistic given 34*)

x/15=.0667x gal. used during 30 min period

(93-x)/50=(1.86-.02x) gal otherwise

.0667x+(1.86-.02x)=2.313
.0467x=.453
x=9.7 miles

if driven in 30 minutes it leads to an average of 19.4 mph

if 45mpg is assumed outside of the 30 min period it works out to an average of 11 mph

I'm going to guess very slow traffic below 8mph (so no regenerative braking) and slight uphill so no glide.

 

You have a paper route in the city and cannot throw the papers ... you have to go into buildings.

 

actually we had a rural route. houses about 2-3 blocks apart. did have one housing development where one stop we would do 4 papers. keep in mind, that his route required door step delivery (inside screen door if avalable) on about 3/4 of the deliveries in the housing project. on the road ones, we did box drops. those were easy.

 

No, I won't admit that. It's all realtive. You were still probably getting much better gas mileage than most other people that were also stuck there. Silver lining...

 

oops... just realized that we are in the wrong thread. my post about delivering the paper was in docvijay's thread. how did we get here?

 

Are you sure that you did not have the door open and your foot out for breaking?