1150 miles and suddenly seeing 5-7 mpg improvement

I've been looking at my trip summary and the same trip to the store that I've made a dozens of times used to show anywhere from 9 to 10 mpg. Without changing my driving style, suddenly the same trip shows 15-16 mpg. I've got about 1150 miles on the ODO.

What gives?

 

Is your temps higher now?
Were you using the same gas?
Has your area switched out winter blend gas?

Seems your truck is going in the right direction for mpg.

 

This is in the middle of a tank of gas. Temps have been about the same here. Unless going from 25 - 40 degrees would make that much of a difference.

 

Your exhaust resistor fell off... Just take it back to the dealer and they will cover it under warranty.

 

just made a 30 mile run to costco. the indicator that shows up when you shut off the engine said 24mpg one way and 25mpg back, tail wind coming back. how accurate is that gauge?

 

Not sure about the accuracy, but I read somewhere where the transmission 'learns' the way you drive and updates itself around 1200 miles. Does anyone know anything about that?

 

i drive mine in S mode all the time. my trip to costco long straight road most of the way had it in 6th gear75% of the time.

 

I have an SR5 4x4 DCLB and it seemed to smooth out a bunch around 1500 miles or so. I have no issue driving 60-70mph without much "gear hunting" between 5th & 6th. Engine power feels like it's smoothed out some also. Did a 70 mile round trip today, 23.7mpg one way and 23.3 coming back. I use S mode exclusively unless I'm out on the highway. I'm not sure you could say it updates itself, but I think the ECU gets accustomed to your driving habits.

 

Truck definitely gets a lot smoother after the first 1-1.5k miles. With a smoother drives comes better MPGs. I'm waiting for my area to swap out the winter fuel for the normal stuff. Curious to see what change in fuel economy I get.

 

Ok, what's "S" mode?

 

Your wife is secretly adding gas to the tank just to mess with you.

 

assuming you are posting about an automatic...shift position to the left of drive position. allows you to paddle shift thru the gears manually.

 

Thanks. I've never used that.

 

i use it all the time. when you shift into S it puts it in 4th gear then you can shift manually when you think it should shift. especially useful if cruising in 6th and come to an incline just pop it back to 5th, foot never changes on the gas pedal but truck will accelerate up the incline better. allows you to shift thru all the gears 1st to 6th at your command.

 

So, by putting in S mode, does it stay in 4th gear or shift up and down automatically 1-4, letting you go to 5/6?

 

Most modern transmissions offer a couple different "modes/maps" of operations (do not think ect mode, its not that).Toyota engineers, program the transmission shift patterns into x amount of files called shift maps. These shift maps determine if the transmission shifting is agressive, gentle, or somewhere in between. But, since the transmission doesn't have an ai, that determines shift maps. What the trans does is, during the first 1k miles, it learns your specific driving style and matches it with the closest preprogrammed shift map. You can always change it, through a transmission reset so your not stuck with that one map.

 

whatever gear you put it in it will shift up automatically to that gear when taking off from a stop.. if you put it in 2nd at a stop it will only shift up to 2nd then each time you push the stick forward it will shift up one gear at a time.....try it you will not break it....

 

Hope that's true for me too.... Under 1k now and got 23mpg on a trip yesterday .

 

I got mine with 4 miles on it. It seemed kinda sluggish and sick at first. I had to use the ECT button alot. The transmission was so lost... Shift to early and slow to downshift. Basicly i keep the auto stick in S mode and manually selected what gears i needed. After about 600 miles i noticed i didn't need to use ECT as the truck started to pull stronger. Currently at 1300 miles and its a whole different truck! Plenty of power and the auto 6 speed has really started to shine.

That Atkinson motor has a strong power band that u can really feel kick in at 4000rpm...dont know how i feel about that though. Needs more grunt under 3500rpms.

 

Unless someone has tracked and calculated several tanks to compare to guage results, I'm not sure that can be answered. Even the SCII, which works pretty good, is almost always off a bit each tank, just because driving conditions vary so much.

I like the SCII for other reasons, mostly systems monitoring that aren't available on the dash. But I still track MPG manually. Intermediate runs on a tank of gas may be high or low, but they never match what the overall tank average was.

Until someone can document the accuracy of the dash display repeatedly and consistently, (or your prove it for yourself) I'd take it with a grain of salt.