Can some one help me with a way to calculate fuel mileage?

Question

What is the correct way to calculate fuel mileage. I've been tabulating miles driven between fill ups and amount of gas, etc...

Answer 1

If you have a 15 gallon tank and can drive 300 miles on a full tank, you get 20mpg
300/15=20 (miles/gallons = mpg)

Fill up when it's close to completely empty to find out how much your tank holds. This information can also be found in the car manual.

Answer 2

Fairly simple,

First of all fill your tank, this will give you a datum point to start from. At the same time take a note of your mileage.

Drive whatever trips you want to do, at the end fill the tank again, taking note of how much fuel you put in and the mileage.

Take the starting mileage from the new mileage and divide this by the number of gallons used. (say you did 250 miles on 8.5 Gallons then your mileage would work out to 29.42 miles per gallons)

If you buy your fuel in liters, do the same thing and get the answer in miles per liter, to change this into M.P.G. multiply the answer be 4.546. (for English Gallons)

If you use different pumps you will get some variation in your readings as different pumps may fill the tank with slightly more or less fuel than the original one.

If you divide the cost of the fuel by the mileage you will get the cost per mile for the fuel.

good luck!

Answer 3

Start with a full tank. Write down current miles. Drive. Next time you get gas, fill the tank back up again. Note miles and amount of gas needed to fill the tank. Take current miles minus previous miles (the miles you wrote down when you start this). This gives you miles driven. Divide that by the number of gallons purchased to refill your tank. This number will be MPG. Repeat as long as you desire.
If you really want to get fancy, if you don't fill the tank full every time, you can just note how many gallons you put in each time, then when you finally put in a full tank, the gallons purchased would be the current purchase plus alll the partial fills after the last fill up.

Answer 4

Fuel mileage connot be determined by a simple math problem. It is very complicated and depends on how one person drives. The MPG of a car is constantly changing according to how much gas you are giving it, and at what RPM's you are traveling at. If you were going at 60 mph for example, and you release the gas pedal and let the car roll, it will have a MPG rating of over 50 MPG's. It all depends on your speed in relation to your RPM's, the faster your car is rolling and the lower the rpms, the more MPG you get. If you want a rough estimate, just drive far away and see how many miles u get out from your car's full fuel capacity. EXAMPLE: if you use nearly all your gas from your tank, and you get 300 miles, and your tank holds 15 gallons, it's 300/15="20 MPG". It's just an average tho.

--Rich

Answer 5

Fill gas tank. Zero-out odometer. Take trip. Record miles traveled. Fill gas tank again. Divide the number of miles traveled by the number of gallons added at second fill-up=MPG. OK?

Answer 6

Run the tank as near to empty as possible. ideally until it stops, but this isn't practical.
Fill it up, and reset the trip.
When the tank is almost empty again divide the miles on the trip by the number of gallons the tank holds (found in the handbook)

ie, 400 miles divided by 15 gallon tank = 26.7MPG

Answer 7

take a road trip. Start with and empty tank and fill up. Find how many gallons are in your tank. Turn on the millage thing and drive until you run out of gas. Then divide that number by the number of gallons your tank holds.

Answer 8

Miles between fillups divided by number of gallons.

This gives you Miles Per Gallon.

Answer 9

amount gas / miles driven
2 gallons / 20 miles = 1 gallon for 10 miles = 0.1 gallon per mile

JohnD

Answer 10

let your tank run dry, put exactly 1 gallon in it (as opposed to filling it up and waisting gas. take a can of extra watch your miles and see how far it takes you. then the extra gas comes in to play.