Fuel Efficiency and the Yaris

[BailOut]

Additional notes & musings:

There is a lot of information here and it may seem overwhelming at first, but there are 2 important things to remember:

1) You don't have to do it all at once.
2) You don't have to do anything that you are uncomfortable with.

The more involved you get the better your FE will become, the lesser your environmental and geopolitical footprints will be, and the lesser your financial burden at the pump. Yet again I stress that all of this is totally voluntary. I encourage you to go as far as you are comfortable with and then re-evaluate.


How can I calculate my mileage?

The next time you fuel up reset your trip meter (part of the odometer). The time you fuel up after that divide how many miles are shown on your trip meter by how much fuel you filled up with, out to 3 decimal places. Don't forget to reset your trip meter before you drive off. If you do not have a trip meter you can track your miles between tanks by subtracting the odometer reading from the reading at the last fueling.

Here is an example: If I traveled 400 miles since my last fueling and I fill up with 9.822 gallons, then 400 / 9.822 = 40.725 MPG.


What kind of FE can you achieve with your Yaris?

As of this writing I am the highest MPG Yaris driver that I am aware of. As such I'll use myself as an example.

Rather than go into every little detail of what I have stacked against me from an FE perspective let me just say that I live and commute in a mountainous area, we get lots of high winds and snowfall, my Yaris has never had straight gasoline in it (my State and the surrounding States are on E10 (at a minimum) year-round), I have little choice as to my commuting hours, I have just one preferable route to work (the next available route is via another city which adds over 45 miles to the round trip), I run on M+S tires year-round, and I must let my wife drive the Yaris for errands (while she takes it easy on the car for my sake she is not a hypermiler).

With that said my best tank as of this writing is 52.538 MPG and my lifetime average for this car so far can be found in my forum signature. The signature also links to my complete Yaris mileage log, starting from the day I bought it.

My goal is to consistently get 50+ MPG.

Other Yaris drivers that are publicly logging their mileage are showing numbers like 48.201, 45.267, 43.421, 42.364, 46.645, and 42.23 MPG for their best tanks.

This shows you that anyone can beat 40 MPG in the Yaris. Yes, this means you, too!