Round Two Results

So a long weekend and a little laziness got in the way of me and this post, but at last I have results from round two of my driving experiment. As you may recall, in round one I drove for fuel efficiency above pretty much all else and achieved a solid 28MPG on my mostly-highway route. Then, I set out to drive for the worst mileage I could get. I think I pulled it off, too! I drove at 80 MPH on the highways, gunned it off the line, pretty much never coasted, broke hard, and all kinds of other bad habits. My route was pretty much the same: - One way trip from Vista to Burbank (highway) - Three commutes (city) - Nearly an entire round trip from Burbank to San Clemente (highway) - Miscellaneous city driving around San Clemente and Burbank (city) In the end I made it 318 miles on 11 gallons. Simple division tells us that's 28.9 MPG. Wait a second! How is it higher mileage than when I tried to drive for fuel efficiency? Well, I don't know. I guess I drove a little further down to San Clemente than to Laguna Niguel, but I didn't make it all the way back before having to fill up, so that should be largely mitigated. There could have been some minor discrepancy between the traffic conditions on the freeway (this is LA after all) that led to more cruising this time around. In all, that could really only be a couple of MPG, which would mean that the maximum spread is about one MPG. It's been kind of a bummer, but I'm still going forward with round three. I'll just drive normally this time around and see how it goes. Since it took me so long to post this, I'm already half way through the tank and, well, the results look similar to the first two rounds. I guess we'll see, probably by Friday if I actually get around to posting. Over the weekend, I whipped up a little Java app to do some calculations for me. Last night I turned it into an applet. In some form, I hope to bring it here in the very near term. Look forward to a little calculator tool very soon!