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Comments
This is a heavy and large volume capacity vehicle. If you are like me, you got it because it would be great for travelling and for hauling stuff from the garden center and home store, but in the end most trips are short and lightly loaded, so a small car would serve that at maybe 24 mpg. (Unless you got some mileage optimized vehicle which would not fulfill oth er needs, then 24 mpg is about what you could get in an efficient widely useful vehicle in suburban use.)
If you drive 12,000 mi / year, then at 18 mpg you use 667 gal of fuel, and at 24 mpg vehicle you'd use 500 gal. A 24 mpg vehicle would save 167 gal of gasoline, which at $4/gal amounts to $667 per year. This is not enough to justify trading in the van to get a more fuel efficient vehicle. Just try to make more efficient use of the vehicle by combining trips, etc.
If you really no longer need a Grand Caravan, you could try selling it to someone who does need one of these real people haulers and will pay a fair price for a well maintained one with a known maintenance history. Then, having sold it, you could make your best deal on say a Caliber, Scion Xb . . . which you would feel better driving. But it would take years to recover the cost of trading. The sensible approach is to just resign youself to paying more for fuel than you had in mind when you bought this vehicle. If the price and availability of fuel really goes crazy then the value of your Grand Caravan will drop precipitiously, but it's already low so you won't lose that much more. You have already taken most of the depreciation hit. And if the cost of fuel goes outa sight then any vehicle you'd get right now might seem like a fuel waster.
1303 miles on it.
Average long term mileage according to the computer is 20.4.
65% short highway runs at about 65 mph.
35% town driving at about 25-30 mph.
The first few hundred miles were in the 16-19 mpg range.
I'm looking forward to a long stint to see how it does over a couple hundred mile stretch.
You might want to spot check that with a calculator a few times and see how accurate that is. My 07 Chrysler display is 1-1.5 mpg less than what I'm actually getting.
After 6,000 miles I've noticed that my average fuel economy has increased by around 2 mpg.
I was somewhat amazed, but it gave me 25.5 over 400 miles. The principal speed limit was 65, but I was traveling with friends (one hauling a heavy load) so mostly went 55-60, with some faster jaunts when I was playing catchup after a stop to nurse the baby, let my son take a potty break, etc.
I was impressed and was certainly not expecting it to be that high.
Average fuel economy this summer while commuting, driving around town, etc., is slightly less than 20.5: Up from 19 last summer after implementing driver modification.
186,000 on the ticker and counting....
Good Job.
Best Regards,
Shipo
I still do not like it much (driving experience) for around town as compared to a Subaru, but it sure is comfortable on long trips. The more upright driving position and copious leg room makes all the difference.
I purchased a 98 Escort (5MT) last week from a friend leaving town, so I use that now for my commuting (>30mpg) to save on fuel and keep some miles off the van. At about 20,000 miles per year, the van's time was likely to be up soon even with meticulous maintenance. I expect the car to pay for itself in less than six months (paid $800 for it), so if it helps extend the van's useful life by a few years by keeping some miles off it, it will pay for itself over and over again.
We actually traded our 2004 Durnago with the Hemi engine. We didn't make the trade due to gas prices but knew that the $ savings wouldn't hurt.
So far the dealer put the first tank in (came with the vehicle) and then they filled it up again for us (long story). We're just about at the end of that tank but if I'm calculating right we're only going to get ~14mpg or so.
Is it normally that bad for the first few tanks/miles? I know the tire pressure is OK but not sure waht else could be going on.
The only other thing that might be a factor is that my wife is used to the Durango and you could just barely press the gas and it would take off. I have a feeling she might be pressign the gas farther to try to compensate. Hopefully her driving habits will adapt to the new vehicle.
My wife's parents have a 2007 t&C and her dad said they get mid/upper 20's.
I guess ours doens't have this "computer" that I keep reading about. Ours just shows the Direction (North, East...etc) and something to do with what's playing on the radio. Is there somehting I'm missing or did that come with a different package?
Ours is the Touring model.
It really helps bring the mileage up if you stay conscious of the average mileage and do things like take off and stop gradually ect... My daughter was getting about 17 with her 06. As sort of a challenge, she changed her habits just a little bit, and for a couple weeks now she has been getting over 20.
I think twenty or better is a reasonable expectation and hope it pans out for you!
Is the 2008 T&C flexfuel?
Best Regards,
Shipo
Miles driven = 10,495
Overall mileage = 20.60 mpg (highway and suburban driving)
Best gas mileage = 26.1 mpg (highway, 75 mph)
Worst gas mileage = 16.7 (around town)
All of these gas mileage figures are based on tank fill ups, not the trip computer. Using the trip computer, we reach 29.7 mpg one time coming back from the mountains, approximately 150 miles at 65 mph.
The minivan is only a week old
average 20 MPG highway
average 15.9 City
If so, I would compute your mileage over several tankfuls of gas by dividing the total distance traveled by the amount gas used (right after you fill up the tank).
Best regards,
Shipo
Best Regards,
Shipo
But the suggestion that the "no-name" is actually E85 is plausible. Is your vehicle rated for E85?
Driver and light load only, 34-35 lb in tires, K&N air filter, full synthetic oil, 65 degree F temperature (no air conditioning just vents), no significant wind, very slight downgrade over 110 miles. I was driving at night, and it was a little foggy, so I mostly kept the cruise control on 63-65 MPH even though the speed limit was 70. At that speed, the tach indicated about 1850 RPM at cruise.
Until I made a short stop, my indicator read 31.7 mpg. When I pulled into the hotel parking lot it was 31.1. Unfortunately, I didn't start with a full fuel load, so I couldn't check my actual MPG. Because it usually reads high a couple MPG, I may not have quite hit 30 real world mpg, but it was close. With about 40 miles of in-town driving in Louisville, some of which was with six passengers and the air conditioning on, and driving home with the air conditioning on in 82 degree weather, and some int-town driving in Indianapolis, my final indicated MPG for the trip was 27.3. That is approximately the same MPG that I got in a Pontiac G6 4 cylinder) under similar conditions a couple years earlier.
One comment about your van's setup; you list a K&N in your description, I submit to you that the K&N does absolutely nothing for fuel economy, however, K&Ns are not as efficient when it comes to cleaning the inbound air, and as such, you can expect high engine wear due to the extra silica that is typically found in the Used Oil Analysis results of K&N equipped engines.
average of 1st 2 tanks (50% hwy + 50% city) = 21mpg (trip computer reading)
forgot to do the manual calculation, will post that for the next 2 tanks.
.
Just completed a 500+ mile trip...there and back, so 1,000+ miles and average exactly 26MPG...mostly all highway with almost 100% cruise control averaging between 65 and 75 MPH.
I'd start being happy about 26 MPG it if I were you.
A/C was on 50% of the time.
Here are the gas mileage stats:
3150 Miles
130 Gallons of Fuel
24.25 MPG
Total Cost of Fuel: $461.00 (Ouch!)
wrong thread, sorry
Never heard it before but I don't buy the programming theory. A bad cat can kill your mpg though.