theres a song that makes it worthwhile it's called take the long way home! and you can't beat the driving so thats another reason i got this car is to drive it for any reason or no reason at all.if i was worried about short trips i drive my accord wagon!!

 

If either route is burning roughly a gallon of fuel, then why not take the more enjoyable way- the one that lets you blast up to 80 mph rather than maxing out at 35 while stuck behind truck after truck. And the bonus is that the car will run better too- all fluids will at least get up to operating, and maybe the plugs won't foul as soon.

 

Old news.

 

At an average what RPM do you drive to get 23MPG? Do you try to keep it below 3740 RPM?

 

On trips I've gotten 24 (between 13 (a/c) and 15 (no a/c) in city), while running the A/C, and I even got stuck in congested traffic for a while.

At highway speeds 60 -70, pretty easy to keep the RPMs down since it's mostly 6th gear. Probably stays around 2000. I wouldn't be approaching 4000 unless the whole trip was up a mountain.

This is not a 20-30 minute trip mind you; this is driving for 4-6 hours.

 

also, short trips means more driving with engine cold which means choke is on which means burning richer which means more fuel burned. you get the idea.

 

in city traffic, you are accelerating constantly. that takes a lot of gas.

this is true for all cars. even the prius.

 

theres a choke?

 

Yeah in DC I drive in rush hour which is every FREAKING hour and burn through an entire tank in a week and only get 208 miles per tank.

O well, lets just bomb Iran and take their oil, then we would not have these issues!

 

It's pretty obvious why this is the case.

Say you drive pretty aggressively, like most of us here probably do. That means you're revving from ~1000 idle to probably at least 6000 RPM in each gear before switching; mash your way up to fourth and chill out if traffic is decent and you can go 60 km/hr comfortably at low revs.

Each time you start off you're peaking it at some pretty high revs multiple times before settling down, and it's a huge waste of energy. Just remember: at 6000 RPM, you're burning double the amount of gas as you would at 3000 (not taking into account the extra ports that open, or anything else).

This is why turbochargers make so much sense: you can get some extra power essentially for free by generating a bit more power at lower RPMs, so you don't need to use as much gas to get up to the same speed.

What I would love to see would be a hybrid rotary. The rotary engine is a perfect size for it - tiny as all hell. But it's not torque-y and it needs to rev pretty high to get power.

Solution: run the rotary as a glorified generator at around a stable 1000-2000 RPM to feed an electric engine, and use that for all the torque and start/stop city stuff. Have the rotary take over on the high end.

I bet you could easily double the gas mileage this way, though you would be adding a lot of weight to the car. But, with the extra torque from a secondary engine, you could still be pretty competitive off the line.

I hope Mazda does this one day.

Edit: Not to mention that the transmission also doesn't do too smoothly until it's warmed up - just my experience, but it seems to take higher revs to make a smooth shift during the first five to ten minutes of driving on a cold morning. After that it's a lot smoother and more pleasant, and you can shift at lower RPMs without ******* it out.

 

Not true. Prius' get better mileage in the city than on the highway. It shuts the engine off when idle.

 

Really? It's been my experience that 75 mph in 6th is right around 4000 rpms. If you are in 6th at 2000 rpms, you are very close to lugging the engine, and probably not doing much more than 40 mph.

 

all cars choke. it's not a mechanical choke like older cars. it's computer controlled.

 

Same, and it will drop now with the cold weather.

 

You know when I first get in my car I look at the gas neddle and it shows one reading. But my car is cold and when I drive my gas nedle will move up. So it looks like I have more gas