Crazy Fuel Estimates?

so the little number that tells you have much km you got left just above your fuel gauge... it was reading 238 when I got in. Drove to work which is about 10km away.

In a lab setting that should bring it down to 228? In real world driving with stops signs, traffic lights, etc, it would be less.

219 is what's left after actual 10km of normal driving.. no traffic, maybe 4-5 red light stops. and somehow sucked up 19km of gas.

Did I actually spend almost twice the amount of gas to go 10km? or are they giving me whacko estimates?

 

I always found it to be inaccurate at short distances. Personally I wouldn’t even worry about it .If u were worried about gas mileage u wouldn’t have bought a truck .drive it and enjoy .

 

It likely estimates based on your current average mpg/km per 100 or whatever weird stuff you guys do up there multiplied by how much gas it thinks is in the tank

It doesn’t subtract how much gas you used

 

Keyword: estimate

 

From dead cold, stop and go, never warmed up completely, yeah, your fuel economy will be pretty bad.

 

It is a guess o meter

 

Those distance to empty displays they put in vehicles are next to useless. They use the mpg numbers for the previous miles, or kilometers, you've driven to estimate how much farther you can go. They have no way of knowing what the road and driving conditions are going to be in the future. I may have averaged 25 mpg for the previous 50 miles, but driving conditions may change dramatically and I may only get 15 mpg over the next 50 miles. The DTE display is estimating when I'll run out of gas based on the 25 mpg I got previously.

And I've seen it work the other way. I've spent the last 50 miles pulling a trailer getting 10 mpg. Park the trailer and start getting 20 mpg. I've seen the DTE display actually go up instead of down.

 

If you actually drive a decent distance, the one in my Honda is pretty accurate [over 100 miles at a minimum] I've done the math on paper and it's not worth bothering with it any more. The further you go, the more accurate it'll be of course but if it's off more then a mile per gallon per tank, I'd be surprised. And it is pretty good with the reduced fuel economy in the winter also, 6-7 MPG drop is pretty common per gallon from cold on daily drive to work for the week. 33-34 in summer, 27 in the winter which figures out very close on paper.

 

It’ll go up after a few months. Mine last fill up it said 338. However I did go 394 miles on the last tank.

 

The electronic fuel estimaters are notoriously inaccurate. I don’t know anyone who would rely on their estimates or plan trips or fuel stops based on the estimates. There are too many unknown variables to make an accurate estimate. It doesn’t know if you’ll be driving freeway 80+, or in stop and go commute traffic or climbing steep grades or mountain roads etc etc. if you want accurate mpg or mpk, fill tank , drive, fill tank again, divide miles driven by gallons used. Easy peasy accurate.

 

Maybe you don't have a locking gas door and someone syphoned a few milliliters of fuel?

 

I filled up today and had 4 miles left on my range and still had 2.7 gallons in the tank. Thus I was still good for 50 more miles. I'm just going to mentally tack on 50 miles to that number on the gauge cluster.