Fill-up, Tuesday, March 15, 2011

463.0 miles
7.652 gallons
$3.439/gallon

60.51 mpg
3.89 L/100km

Wentworth's complete fueling history

Around $26 for 463 miles of driving. Found that the local BP station drops their prices dramatically every Tuesday, so looks like that's the new fill-up spot.

I was a little surprised that I got over 60 mpg, since I had my usual short trips for clients, as well as one miserable day of rain and wind netting me around 56 mpg for a trip over which I can usually get around 65 mpg.

I also took a wrong turn on the way home from the airport today, and accidentally spent most of the trip home on the highway. Bad news: 58.7 mpg over 68 miles. Good news (besides getting home a little earlier): recalling that I was around 53 mpg when I took the exit for the slower roads at 46.4 miles into the trip, I've calculated that I got 76 mpg over the last 21.6 miles.

This last bit was awesome to see since it was 36°F, but especially because I used a bit of advice I stumbled upon in one of Wayne Gerdes' comments on a cleanmpg.com post about hypermiling the Prius. **Prius-specific driving info** Someone had asked him how on earth he got the display to read 99.9 mpg for a trip with numerous stoplights and stop signs (just like mine tonight...). He said he would accelerate to 15 or 17 mph using EV mode, then continue to pulse generally keeping his instant mpg at about 1.2 times current mph until kicking the engine off for a glide. Thus, at 20 mph when the engine has just lit, you want instant mpg to read 24 mpg, and so on. This obviously isn't reasonable in traffic, since EV accelerates obnoxiously slow, but on a night like tonight with empty roads, it was worth a try, and paid off. There were stoplights galore - it really is an engineering marvel, this little bundle of steel and electronics.