comparing apples to oranges...

[tyree]

I'm not sure if the FAQ covered this but i was trying to comapre my mileage with other like vehicles and i was having a hard time with it. i have a 2009 jetta with a 2.5L gas engine and i wanted to compare my mileage to others with the same engine and i don't see a really good way to do that. all the 2009 jettas with diesel engines are throwing the numbers inthe chart all out of kilter.

is it possible to at least the seperate the gas numbers from diesel numbers? i completely understand how all the numbers here are user supplied and somebody could game the numbers but at least seperating the two would be helpful.

thanks...

[mathowie]

You can click the "filter" option on the page showing all jettas to see just the gas engine models.

Here is a listing of just Gas L5 engines (Not sure the jetta even has a L5 engine, but people are claiming it does) that excludes all TDI model.

[pb]

This old blog post has screenshots of filtering in action.

[jhu]

Can you add a filter by year and by car generation? The only ones I see are engine type and body style.

[jhu]

Also, I thought "L5" means it has 5 cylinders. If so, the '09 Jettas certainly do have 5 cylinders as the base gasoline engine in the USA.

[pb]

You can filter by year. Just click on the year and you'll go to the model year page. For example, here is the generic Toyota Prius page. Click on the headline 2006 on that page and you get to the 2006 Toyota Prius page.

[undesigner]

there really needs to be a more comprehensive list of engine & transmission choices, like how fueleconomy.gov does it. other wise, like the OP says, comparisons are apples and oranges.

in my case, i have a 2006 scion xB 5sp transmission, but there's no way to specify that. so, the numbers i'm putting in are being lumped together with both auto and manual xBs. while the current implementation affords more data for each car model, it does so at the expense of being able to have an accurate comparison.

[pb]

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.