Matt Haughey [wholelottanothing.org] and Paul Bausch [onfocus.com] have started up Fuelly [fuelly.com], which is a website that allows you to share and track your car's fuel mileage, among other things.
They just opened their doors to the public last week, and apparently, it has started to take off. I actually have been tracking the fuel consumption in my daily driver (and using Matlab to plot the statistics), so I can see why people would want to use this kind of service. If you are looking for a new vehicle, you can get access to a database of real-world fuel consumption by owners of that vehicle (albeit the data may be skewed, because Fuelly users will probably be more fuel efficient than average).
The reason that I have started to track my fuel mileage is because there are several things that I would like to measure (being a scientist), such as:
- Is there a noticeable impact on fuel economy when I change my engine air filter?
- Does my car do better with certain brands of gas than others (as I suspect that it does)?
- There is certainly a temperature-related effect on fuel economy, as lower ambient temperatures absolutely cause lower fuel efficiency numbers. But what is the relationship? Linear? Asymptotic?
However, the gas pumps don't always fill your gas tank up to the same level. And if you "top off" your tank, you totally will throw the measurement off. My data once (erroneously) showed that I achieved 45mpg over one tank in my non-hybrid car (which is unrealistically high), because the gas station I went to didn't fully fill up my gas tank. And then on the next stop, where my gas tank did actually get filled to the top, my fuel economy dropped precipitously. Maybe there needs to be a way in Fuelly to add an asterisk to data that is questionable.
Image of Fuelly stats from mathowie's Flickr photostream [flickr.com].
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