Why fill my tank?

[acidtonic]

Why can't we track mileage without filling our tank? I find that hauling around another 6.5lbs x 10+ gallons really makes a difference for me in regards to mileage. The extra weight ruins my numbers.

I was all excited about Fuelly, but bummed when I realized I have to fill my tank. There are other algorithms to calculate mileage without doing that, and I thought you guys had something more up to date.

I put about $10-15 in my tank every day...sometimes every other day. With the odometer and gallons presented, why is that so difficult? The formulas converge and sure after a few first fillups it's not as accurate.... but my best fuel saving tip is to not fill your tank!! I would theoretically save more fuel by not using Fuelly..... If only there was a site to track it without filling up to find out!

[mathowie]

We have a FAQ item about this, but to reiterate: we built the site aimed at casual drivers wanting to track their fuel consumption with the least amount of work possible. That means just tracking your odometer and filling up all the way each time you hit a station.

If you've got equipment on your car that gives you exact fuel numbers or find yourself going to a station every day instead of once a week in order save weight, you're kind of beyond the casual driver and doing more serious hypermiler stuff, and Fuelly wasn't built to accomodate the way hypermile drivers behave. We believe there is much more fuel savings possible if we could get the vast majority of drivers that don't track their fuel consumption to start using the site.

[acidtonic]

I've read that portion of the FAQ but really don't think rolling mileage tracking is a hypermile only feature. Others buy gas on days it's cheaper when they might not need a fillup or has the funds. After all I drive an Evo for crying out loud.... I'd have to say I'm the opposite of a hypermiler since the car gets 19mpg city and makes 300 horse from 2.0 liters.

[mathowie]

The bottom line is we are aiming the site to have the least amount of "friction" with your life. So if I look at all my friends that drive cars, everyone just drives to work, school, etc and fills up once a week or two. Not all of their cars have tripometers or do they remember to reset them each time. The easiest way to use the site is to track those fill ups and note odometer distance each time.

Your case is unique, and there's probably a smartphone application that allows for fuel economy tracking without fill ups that would better suit your driving patterns.

[babygdav]

lol. I agree with the original. How many people run to EMPTY every fillup? Going to mountains - filling up early. Long trip to Vegas - filling up early. Got a Friday date - filling up early.

Not even hypermiling, but read the 1/2 tank only tip and it so makes sense to drop 30lbs+ of dead weight permenantly. (And the 5 gallons left will easily take me 160 miles!)

My spreadsheet's got 3 columns - gal, dist, mpg - and it calculates each fillup mpg & total mpg.

How hard is it again?.... hmmm.....

[pb]

You don't need to run it down to empty, we're not saying that. You just need to fill to full each time you fill if you want to do this style of tracking.

[NathRajah]

Actually start with a fill up and the odometer reading. Then keep all your receipts for the partial fill ups and do one fill-up whenever you feel like next recording your mpg. So you have a beginning odo and ending odo and from the receipts the total gallons used. I fill up everytime because I want to know how efficient my car is functioning every week. By the way I combine my fill ups and enter it monthly in Fuelly.

[Pancake]

Acidtonic: I seriously doubt an extra 65 lbs. of gas really makes that much of a difference in your fuel economy, not enough to notice.

mathowie: just for the record, a hypermiler fills up as infrequently as possible to avoid wasting extra gas getting to and from the gas station and to limit the amount of gas vapor released into the environment through refuelling.

[ProDigit]

You mentioned that this type of fueling up is "unique", but the original poster just like me clearly are not convinced it is so unique!

People paying with cash nearly ALWAYS fill up for a certain amount (eg $20), rather than fill to the brim.

I'd also agree with the original poster that especially nowadays, when gasoline becomes more expensive, many people don't have the luxury to just empty their accounts on gasoline, and are more prone on buying what they need and no more; say $15 on gasoline, so they can use the remaining money for emergencies.

I would state that the way people have been filling up their tank, is drastically changing with the hike in fuelprice, as well as with the bad economy.

More and more users will be asking for this feat, and will end up going to other sites, because this site is not giving them the option to track mileage the way they are used to.

In fact, I might as well write a MS Access form and graph to track my fuel. I'm sure it really isn't a hard thing to do...

[pb]

I completely understand where you're coming form, ProDigit. We're not out to get all people who want to track their fuel economy. We have a way of doing things and it's not going to be everyone's way of doing things. There's room on the Web for many different types of applications to help people track their fuel economy. We don't claim to have The One True Way.

We just have the way we've been doing it for years and we wanted to share that with others by making a web application.