Need some validation for logging entries

[openupyoureyes]

Originally Posted by Railhead

Wow! So let me get this straight. If I hypermile, and get gas mileage higher than "normal", someone might have a problem with it? They better not check my motor scooter mileage, where I got 136 MPG. or where I can go 138 miles on 2 gallons in my Prius. Yes it is down hill. Some drivers do live in the mountains.

Nobody has any problem with hypermiling and getting gas mileage much higher than normal. Can anyone actually read, understand, and comprehend english? The problem is with ERRONEOUS INVALID EXTREME INCORRECT ENTRIES skewing the actual data. Entries like 133 MPG other than for scooters, or 8 MPG for a turbo diesel vehicle that averages 40 MPG.

You can get 69 MPG in your Prius for two miles, even that's only half of 133 MPG and that kind of mileage would only be valid for a limited number of special vehicles like a Prius or other hybrids or turbo diesels with average MPG values of 40 or more from the factory, it's never going to happen in vehichles with avg MPG values of 20 or 30 from the factory. Also, what's your mileage on the 2 miles you're going back uphill to your mountain estate? and the average MPG for a tank of fuel not only going downhill?

The whole point is keeping the obvious errors and invalid data from being saved on the site or staying on the site and causing the actual average MPG for that vehicle to be incorrect because of the skewed data. Allowing a 50% overage underage from the factory avg low and high MPG values for the vehicle seems like a reasonable range for nearly every situation except for the most extreme hypermilers in unordinary circumstances.

I'm also fairly certain the whole point of the fuelly website isn't for the few extreme hypermilers to enter their data, it's for the average driver to enter their results for the actual mileage they are getting from their vehicle to compare with the factory or EPA estimate mileage to see if that's the same as real world experience with the vehicle.

[openupyoureyes]

Unless this van has trans problems and only 1st and 2nd gear left, there's no way this person got only 4 and 9 MPG their last two fill ups, and the erroneous low numbers skew the data for the vehicle as a whole by several MPG with such a limited number of data points.

http://www.fuelly.com/car/chrysler/t...ehderaj/217468

Wow, of the two vehicles of this year and model, they both have invalid data, because I'm sure this owner miraculously got double the MPG they were getting on average, as opposed to forgetting to log a fill up and using two tanks full for the 556 miles and 33 MPG they recorded.

http://www.fuelly.com/car/chrysler/t...7/doug32/30876

Check another year, find more bad data

http://www.fuelly.com/car/chrysler/t...edresser/68898

[andyrobo]

Thnaks for pointing out that other fuel-up issue on the second car there. Fuelly was setup as a very simple way for people to track fuel economy with very basic limitations in place for data quality checks. This was done on purpose by the founders but it's clear we need to evolve and put some more logic in place to identify and handle these issues. We'll be developing some algorithms to identify these out-of-bounds fuel-ups and notify the owners on a suggested fix. Once the new algorithms are in place we will also use them when data is being entered to hopefully get them to fix the input when it's happening. We don't have an ETA on this new system but hopefully it will be fairly soon. We just moved to a new tech stack a couple months ago and are almost settled enough to start working on new functionality like that.