Doing it wrong?

In a previous post, Jessica had mentioned my current fascination with "hypermiling". I read a story about it in Popular Mechanics, or some other such magazine, and it seemed like an interesting idea. Unfortunately, I was unable to accurately track my MPG due to the way that we had to get fuel in Italy. It's a long uninteresting story, just take my word that it was not feasible.

Germany, on the other hand, is another story entirely. Once we arrived here, I was able to accurately track the amount of gas that I was getting at each fill up. So after being here for a couple of months, and having multiple fill ups, I'm able to present some of my initial results from my hypermiling.

This chart shows the first four fill-ups since I arrived here in Germany in on June 1:



I should preface that chart with some facts about the situation. I have a '94 Fiat Tipo (four-door compact). My driving is almost entirely city driving to and from work; it's about a 7 mile commute through stop and go traffic. My best MPG was 36.07 on 31 Jul, and my worst was 30.28 on 1 Oct. The average of the four months is 32.67 mpg. I'm a little stymied that there was such a drop from July to Sept, but I attribute it to the move up to Germany in June. The mileage that I used in my first July computation included the mileage for the autobahn driving on the move up from Italy. I think I must have been getting much better mileage during that trip, which accounts for the unusually high MPG for the first month.

But overall, not too shabby. Considering that I'm getting almost as good MPG with a 14 year old car as some get with a brand new hybrid is pretty noteworthy. Not only that, but I paid €600 for my car, as opposed to $22,000 for a new Prius.