Fill-up, Sunday, June 5, 2011

Holy crap.

523.9 miles
7.399 gallons
$3.899/gallon

70.81 mpg
3.32 L/100km

Wentworth's complete fueling history

I think this pretty much puts to rest claims of any other sort of car matching hybrid mileage, but I digress... :-)

I paid $28.85 to drive 524 miles. Insane!

The weather was getting warmer, and I specifically went for a record tank. I almost would have thought it's a bladder fluke, but for several reasons:

1. The last couple tanks I modified pulse and glide style, and all of them have shown much better results.

2. The average of my last three tanks is now standing right at 68 mpg hand-calculated, and 70 mpg fits right in there.

3. I've now calibrated Scangauge hopefully once and for all around the numbers for the last several tanks (I didn't reset it the entire time), so I was expecting numbers slightly higher than what I'd been seeing. I estimated around 68 for tank on the "low" numbers, so 70 again is quite realistic.

4. I did have some awesome longer drives (to and from Boston, seen here and here), so that brought up the mpgs some, but also some short trips that averaged those nice figures down a little. May not be reproduceable in my normal commute, we'll see.

What this means for me is that I'll continue to pulse somewhat gradually, dealing almost exclusively with terrain instead of RPMs, kW, whatever. I aim for the speed I want at the top of the hill, that's it. I use RPM sometime for accelerations from low to higher speeds, that's it. Longer pulse means better battery charging, and I watch SOC to make sure it's not too low, and it makes a good difference. Besides that, the cool thing is that I barely need the Scangauge for my driving. 71 mpg just driving. I actually use the engine much more these days than a few months back, and also feel myself more with the flow of traffic.

Of course, when no one else is on the road, I pull out the crazy hypermiling.

Second big conclusion is that I now am a fan of BP Invigorate gas. Whether it's really something special or just the summer gas mix is in effect I don't know, but it's irrelevant. I've been filling up at a BP station and getting this mileage, so that's going to continue. I filled up at a different BP station than normal today to compare to my usual one.

EDIT: I hadn't reset my mileage consumption screen in three tanks. It showed 68.8 mpg I believe (had a camera in the glovebox for the occasion, forgot to take picture amid all the math I was doing at the pump) over the 1500 or so miles, and actual calculated was 67.98 mpg. This is scarily accurate, I believe the quality of the gas has something to do with it, since Tom explained very nicely on PriusChat how computer mileage calculations would be exactly the same even if you threw water in your tank.