When Does the Car Actually Run Out of Gas?

[lolder]

It should be directly related to your last 500 miles and about 12 1/2 gal of fuel unless it's wildly different from Gen 1. Maybe the software doesn't account for the smaller tank in Gen II.

Edited August 24, 2013 by lolder

[acdii]

I give very little credence to the dash gauges. Especially when the time I had DTE of well over 58 Miles on my 34 mile trip home and halfway home had less than 20 MTE. This while getting 46.7 MPG on the current tank. Now I just fill it when its around a 1/4 tank when I can and forget about how far I can go between fills. I am at the point that I say, screw the MPG, just enjoy the car. I know if I try hard enough I can get 47, but I am getting tired of the hybrid games, and the tailgaters, and the haters, and bubba in his pickup.

[HyTi Fusion]

Amen! Riding with an egg between my foot and the pedal is exhausting.

[expresspotato]

I rock the car to squeeze in more gas when filling :play:

[MaineFusion]

I graphed out my last tank of gas based on a photo log I took after most trips of any distance.

Most of the first half of this tank was at speeds between 35 - 55 mph. The zig zag section of the segment MPG graph was caused by me driving to work on the Maine Turnpike vs sticking to secondary roads. The last two segments were a trip to Boston Logan Airport to pick someone up. The goal was to see how well the trip computer predicted distance to empty and to see if there were any obvious calibration errors due to the shape of the tank. From this graph I couldn't make a definitive determination due to changes in driving conditions causing big fluctuations in MPG. On my trip to Boston, my wife was with me, which added one extra passenger of weight from normal and on the way back, I added a second passenger plus luggage. All told the final segment (and worst MPG) had around 350 lbs of extra weight. It was late at night so traffic was very light even in Boston. We also had some pretty heavy rains around the 6.7 gal mark.

 

The idea with the graph was that if I could keep a pretty consistent MPG. The DTE plus miles driven should result in a fairly flat top line if the fuel tank is properly calibrated for its odd shape. Overall. From the beginning to the end the DTE was off by about 64mi. About 10 - 15mi of this difference could be attributed to the the significant loss of MPG in the final two driving segments

Edited September 17, 2013 by MaineFusion

[hybridbear]

I graphed out my last tank of gas based on a photo log I took after most trips of any distance.

Very cool!