When we built the site we were aiming for a wide audience. We wanted people who weren't necessarily into cars to use Fuelly to track their fuel economy. So we made some tough choices about what to include and exclude when you create a vehicle on the site. Someone might know, for example, that they have a Honda Accord but they don't necessarily know or care if it's the LX, EX, EX-L, or EX V6. And we felt like if we presented thousands of choices when creating a car, people might be intimidated by the form and give up.
In retrospect, I wish we would have included transmission type on the form. But that was the choice we made at the time. I think we'll find a way to include it at some point, but finding which cars have which transmissions is no small task. We might be able to scrape that data from fueleconomy.gov and we might be able to purchase it from someone for a hefty fee. Either way, it won't be included in the site for some time, so we have a system that gives you a sense of models rather than specifics down to trim level.
The primary goal of Fuelly is helping people track their fuel economy. We get some fun aggregate data to play with too, but we're not as concerned about finding exact numbers as sites like fueleconomy.gov are. When you're comparing models, get a sense of things with Fuelly and then turn to other sources when you're getting specific. I think there's a place for both types of tracking.
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