Category: Vehicles

Car Stats: Speed vs Instant Mpg

Previous posts in the series:

This is using the built in scatter plot in Torque. 

  • Limited to {I chose} 2000 samples; after which it starts to get weird.
  • Logging every second.

The question I have: Is it really that much more gas efficient to drive slower on the interstate?

Answer:  I can’t tell yet.

speed vs instant mpg

  • This is from a drive around the interstate.. starting from Blankenbaker Parkway (Zaxby’s parking lot), out to the mall, up I264, up I71, to the rest area before Crestwood.
  • I tried not being obnoxious driving 55 .. even though it’s the speed limit, its relatively quite slow.  I think the stretch from Hurstbourne to I264 is downhill.  50MPG?
  • Interestingly, I’m seeing some indication that driving 75 vs driving 65 is more efficient – however, that might have been related to the big truck in front of me.  There was a lot of traffic, made it harder to do the experiment.
  • It looks like the “worst” mpg gets barely worse, but the “best” mpg is much better at lower speeds. 
  • To get this, I had to export to a file on my droid, and then email myself the file, then edit it in Paint.Net.

I’ve figured out a better way to get this data long term, will revisit this later with more data. (next post!)

Car Stats: OBDII + Android + Torque (feat GoPro Hero3 Black)

Part of my Christmas loot was a big fat bonus from my Employer. This has lead to various toys to play with. One of them was a BAFX Products ELM327 OBD Scan Tool to use in my car.

Another Christmas item (from my wife) was a GoPro Hero3 Black.

So I combined showing them into a single video.   The video shows it better than I could explain it; and really, there’s a ton of sites explaining Torque out there.  What I wanted to show was the “how integrated it feels” bit.

Here’s the video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzjDxn0Ln7Q&w=448&h=252&hd=1]
Testing Hero3 Black by demoing Torque

My take-aways:

  • The newness wears off after a week.   Sometimes, its distracting.  
  • My car uses 0.2 gallons per hour when idling; more when warming up.
  • The color on the Hero3 initially seemed bland, but was much more “workable” than the Hero960.   Much better Midtones, more data to work with.
  • I like that I can pretty much leave the droid in the car.   It has Navigon USA on it as well, it can double as a GPS, even though there is no cell service activated for it.

Fun fun!