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That cannot be. When you plan and build a plant like one at Aguascalientes, you do not plan to have it idle at any time. You have to amortize the investment just as soon as possible, and you cannot do that by idling the plant. What idling a line does is to raise the manufacturing cost of each unit to roll off the plant, and that happens literally every minute the line is not moving, without any exaggeration. Therefore, when a line has to be idled, the earlier sales goal no longer does any good, since you now have to build and sell more to recoupe the same amount of capital invested in the facility (unless, of course, you can raise the price of vehicle, but that would kill you too, only in a different way). The sales goal, then, becomes a moving target.
It's a vicious cycle - you idle the plant because you are not selling well, but if you do that, you now have to sell more than ever to amortize the investment made. This problem is, needless to say, not unique to Nissan, as we all know in this day and age.
Thank you.
I've gotten poor mileage in my 07 Versa sedan with auto CVT transmission. I live in Philadelphia, Pa., at sea level and do moslty highway driving. I have yet to crack 26 mpg. Yesterday i filled up and got a whopping 23.5 mpg. I now have @ 7500 miles on the car, enough for post-break-in to have happened.
S. Texas flat terrain, mild winter, 20 of 75 miles to and from work are city miles. I usually pick it up a little in the morning but do 60 mph on my way home to (psychologically) compensate. = 32-33 mpg
Driving the white mountains of N. Arizona both in cold weather (snow) and spring weather =.28-30 mpg
But if you are balancing comfort and mileage, the Versa, in my opinion, is not bad. However, be sure to look also at the Corolla, Civic, and maybe Elantra as well, as the Versa is actually in this segment. And these other cars tend to get good MPGs.
2000 miles on my 2008 and I get 36mpg HWY and 34 overall. Suburban driving; not alot of close city driving.
Average terrain: some flat, some hills.
I drive carefully, anticipate areas where I can coast, do not generally drive above 2,000rpm, except for a burst to get on the highway and the 2,800+ rpm to drive 60-65mph.
I do not downshift to brake often, but I do enjoy the advantages of a manual tranny.
I am not a hypermiler; I drive carefully with the flow of traffic.
Hope this helps for info.
377.17 miles for 10.57 gallons 35.68 mpg
Mostly highway 60 mph. I work 30 miles from home.
I accelerate without passing 2200 rpm.
Can you remind me which Versa you have?
I've got a 07 HB with CVT (about 7000 miles on it) and I thought I was doing good with my best numbers being 29mpg town and 37mpg hwy (all flat terrain, near sea level (East Coast)). To see how driving style might change the mpg, I drove a lot more aggressively on my last tank (mostly town, some very short hwy)... quick take-offs from lights, getting up to speed faster, punching it more... etc... basically having a lot more fun. :-) I managed 28.4 doing that. So not much less than when I drive conservatively.
FWIW, I always wait until the light goes on before I fill up. I also let the pump run full speed until I hit about 9 gallons. Then I stop it and run it real slow. Then at the first click, I remove the nozzle.
It isn't just Nissan... look at the EPA website to see that all vehicles were affected; some by larger margins than the Versa.
I average 35 mpg with regular.
I do like to try supreme gas on my cars. With my Ford Focus 2002, i save at least 10% of gas on supreme gas. In the winter though there is no difference.
62 mph on highway.
I work on evenings, no traffic.
I do some city driving maybe 10% of my driving.
I love the car more and more, confortable for a small car.
Why don't you try to drive the same stretch of highway twice, the first time using Supreme and the second time using Regular. Make sure the weather, traffic, time of the day and speed are the same. But wait, that is not possible, isn't it?
It is very hard to duplicate driving conditions in order to isolate the cause of better mileage.
I could swear that every time I put new synthetic oil in my car I save at least 10%, if not more. Reality is that for some reason I tend to be a little easier on the gas and that is all it takes to get better mileage.
12.35 gallons
I was trying to get 700 kms (435) with a tank. I was a little to close to a empty tank. I got into the traffic for one trip ( 1/2 hour of traffic ).
A lot of highway ( 62 mph ).
11.05 gallons
30% City and stop and go.
The gaz light wasn't on before i filled.
liters km's l/100km mpg
43.0 430 10.0 28.2
45.4 367 12.4 22.8
44.0 440 10.0 28.2
44.6 422 10.6 26.7
45.3 415 10.9 25.9
46.4 435 10.7 26.5
43.2 425 10.2 27.8
19.9 241 8.3 34.2
The last figure is the only pure highway rating, but driven twice over a 7500ft mountain pass during the trip. The rest are 20% highway numbers.
I measure tank to tank, and always fill to the second click, so these should be accurate. I would peg this car at 25/36 under my local conditions.
I have to admit I too was disappointed at the ratings compared to the misleading sticker of 33/45. But, as was pointed out before, the room, power and comfort of this small car are very pleasing. Compared to the 2.5s 4sp auto 2005 Altima we also own, this car feels much less heavy (duh:) and gets 4 mpg better overall. (and 20 better than the 77 mustang
5.4 gallons
I have a 2008 SL hatchback with CVT. I drove it off the lot yesterday with 12 miles on the odometer and a "full tank" to stay with family overnight (I got a really good price buying out of state) about 15 miles away. Today I drove the odometer to 218 miles from NH to Maine over a heavily rolling landscape with very heavy rain for about 40 miles (thus 206 since leaving the lot). I refilled the tank (with a top-off) at 5.4 gallons near Bangor. I ran the air conditioner off and on during the rainy period to help defog the windows (about 20 min). Outside air temperature was about 71F. About 15-20% of my mileage was in-town driving and the rest would be reasonably classified as highway. My mileage, assuming the tank was similarly topped-off by the dealership - which is probably a conservative estimate) was thus 38.14 mpg without any break-in period! As a late season 2008 my car had the EPA mileage estimate of 2/33 mpg highway so I am extremely pleased with my actual mileage.
Keep in mind that I set the cruise control to 60 mph because I didn't want to be too rough on the car during the break-in phase. I've heard a lot of rumors that the key to sucking the most mileage out of the CVT is to use cruise control and I have to say it works.
Am I wildly optimistic to think that with a break-in period I could reach 40 mpg? I have to say that I am more than willing to drive a 60mph if that is some sort of sweet spot for mileage (my rpms held just below 2k for almost all of the highway time).
Awesome car for the money!
To break in the engine in your Versa, the worst you can do is use cruise control over the first few thousand miles. You should vary speeds and rpm's and let the transmission do much of the breaking, to properly seat the rings.
If you are very light on the gas, you will achieve MPG in the 32 to 38 range.
thanks for the insights. You make some valid points, and I appreciate the pointer about not using CC too much at this early stage (do CVTs have rings?). That said, as a statistician I cannot see how my estimate would be much of an overestimate since I used a conservative estimation technique (e.g., it would be difficult to underestimate the amount of gas used, unless the dealership has some way to get much more gas in the tank than me). Sampling error would decrease somewhat in going from 5.4 to 10 or more gallons. but not by a huge amount (like going from 1 to 5 gallons). Indeed, a much bigger factor in any mileage estimation would be the fact that with more driving one would sample more of a mixture of city and highway driving conditions which will obviously reduce the mean highway value. We call this temporal averaging in my field and it is somewhat problematic in that it confounds variation with the mean and can obscure very important trends within the data. If one ideally wants to obtain a highway estimate of mileage then the mileage should only be estimated for the portion of a tank that represents highway travel and the same could be said of city driving. I don't know about you folks, but its a pretty rare event that I burn off a whole tank on a highway, much less 5 tanks (I believe that would probably get me roughly from Maine to Montana). If one wants to reduce sampling error it would be much better to calculate the mean of several estimates for purely highway trips (fill at the on-ramp and refill at the off-ramp). This would provide an estimate of the pure highway value and and estimate of what we call the standard error of the mean (different than the variance of the data itself). This value is useful in that it allows one to actually quantify statistically whether one mileage estimate is higher or lower than some expected value (like the EPA estimate). One could of course do the same thing for city driving.
Another way to handle error is to estimate bounds on the likely error and estimate what that would do to the final estimate. In my case, some quick calculations show that my estimate would not be off by more than two miles per gallon had I somehow put a full third of a gallon less gas in the car than the dealership was able to (and I did slow my fill near the end and topped off, which I usually do not do, to guard against this error and make my estimate somewhat conservative).
I don't mean to be unrealistic and I hope you did not think that I was claiming that I expect my car will always get 38 mpg, I'm just happy to not get the really poor mileage that some folks reported (i.e., 20's for highway). I would still be very happy with a Versa that gets 36-38 mpg on the highway brand new. I should clearlyl get more chances to quantify mileage and provide the sort of estimate I described above.
cheers,
Mike
The engine has rings. Although modern cylinders have a "break in pattern" machined into the cylinder walls, the last two remaining pieces of advice - make that three pieces - are:
1. Varying engine speed helps seat the rings. Thus city driving is better than freeway driving, and freeway driving with cruise is the worst.
2. When cold,you shouldn't use more than 1/4 throttle.
3. When warm, during breakin (first 600-1000 miles) you should use no more than 3/4 throttle - no "pedal to the metal." Speeds up to 80 or 90 are generally fine though, top speed isn't an issue so much anymore.
The mpg then declined gradually to a low point of less than 25 mpg in mostly city traffic with the AC always on
Then you wrote:
EUREKA! In the last 2500 miles since that oil change I have gotten 34.4 mpg, about 70% highway driving with the AC usually on.
I don't want to sound too picky, but from these descriptions you are not comparing your Versa in the like situations. There is a big difference between driving mostly city traffic and driving 70% highway. In fact, in some cars, a gain of 50% or more in mileage is not unusual when you go from pure city driving to highway driving even without raising the tire pressure.
I and many others know that raising the tire pressure is good for mileage. The question for your Versa is how much of the mileage jump is attributable to the tire pressure, and how much of it is the driving condition. It is a little difficult to isolate the two with your situation.
just thought I would let you know that I am still very pleased with the mileage on our Versa. We now have over 1300 miles on the car with 4 tank fills (first fill was a bit small but later fills were large (9-11+ gallons). I have yet to get under 33.2 mpg including one tank that was entirely in city driving and one tank (my most recent) that was what I consider tough highway driving (80+ mph, AC on and passing numerous other cars). A mixed highway-city tank with plenty of AC use (ca. 50/50 each) netted us 34.7 mpg. Clearly, how you drive the car makes a big difference in mileage, but if our bottom end stays above 33 for all types of driving (as it has so far) we certainly couldn't ask for more (we are doing much better than the new EPA estimate for the SL CVT 30/33). The potential to hit 38+ with careful highway driving (60 mph with CC and no AC) is just icing on the cake. Hopefully I will get a chance to try to replicate those conditions soon.
cheers!
The other car I use for my commute (I switch them off to keep the mileage lower) is a Honda Fit and has been consistently returning 37+ mpg on the same commute, but it is a much smaller, less posh vehicle.
I drive a 2007 Sentra with CVT, average 35 MPG so far and just reached 30k miles.
I recently got a 2009 Versa SL sedan and am very happy with it except with the mileage. I have 650 miles and I am getting an average of 30 mpg with mostly highway driving and driving at 60 miles/hour without much throtling. Does the versa 2008 have better mileage than 2009 or is it because I am still in the breakin period? My other question is that the main front headlights have a orange reflector on the side but I think it doesnt work as the left and right indicator lights are loacted in the front of the headlight. Does anyone know if it is for the left and right indicator and is it that mine is not working or am I missing something here.
Thanks,
Mansa