Drivetrain options and sorting

[Ryanthegreat1]

Nothing is broken, just some constructive criticism from an automotive enthusiast.

Would it be possible to add a drive train configuration to the list of car options? Much like there are engine options.

Many vehicles are sold in 2wd, 4wd and Awd all under the same make and model. This makes it rather hard to do an apples to apples comparison when judging one's fuel consumption.

A great example would be the Toyota Pickups, there are 2wds and 4wds all mixed up and greatly skewing the results if one were looking for just 4wd mileage.

And Maybe just nitpicking but what about an option for listing turbo models? For example the Subaru's, they are almost all going to be an H4 engine but a large percentage of them are going to have turbos once again skewing results.

[pb]

Thanks for the criticisms, you have great points. This recently came up in an earlier thread so I'll just repeat some of what I said there:

"We also often say that if everyone reporting via Fuelly had to enter 20 different data points about their vehicle before they started tracking, we wouldn't have any data to look at. We definitely made some hard choices erring on the side of keeping things extremely simple when we built the site. I'd like to be able to compare trim levels of various models to see how it affects fuel economy, but we assume a large swath of people reporting at Fuelly don't know what a "trim level" is, and we think that's spectacular. We didn't build Fuelly for car enthusiasts, we built it for anyone to use, and that's a hard balance to strike."

Having said that, we do want to add automatic vs. manual transmission at some point. But we don't want to get too deep into the differences in trim levels of various models. The style of tracking we do here at Fuelly isn't science—it's notebook-in-the-glovebox math. So we aren't too worried about making things precise. We'd rather have more people tracking and thinking about fuel economy than less and we're afraid that getting too technical means scaring away people who are drivers rather than enthusiasts.

There are sites and applications out there built for people who want to get into the details and I think there's space for both kinds of tracking.

[Ryanthegreat1]

Thanks for sharing, I can understand where you are coming from with keeping things simple.

I will be keeping an eye out for that auto vs. manual addition!

[Slvregl]

pb,

Thanks for keeping it simple. I REALLY like this site.

Thanks, Bob