Milage may vary

I have come to the end of my crazy road trip. After 2300 miles I am back in San Diego as the semester starts tomorrow. The trip was fun I got to see a bunch of friends and travel all of the place. Probably a better use of time over anything else I would have done over my break.

During the entire trip I had my eyes glued to my dash which displays my gas mileage. Since it was such a long trip I felt it would be good to track my mileage and see if my display is accurate. I ended up with a grand total of traveling 2300 miles, burning 44 gallons of gasoline, paying $86.80 at prices ranging from 1.899-2.079 dollars/gallon, while getting an overall 54 MPG. The price came to a bit more than I had originally estimated but I ended up traveling more miles as I drove around a bit at most of my stops.

I drive a Honda insight which is the first hybrid sold in America. The dash displays the instantaneous MPG as well as the MPG for the current trip. I tracked the entire journey with one trip while used the other two trip settings to give me estimates for each leg of the journey. My mileage was much different depending on how I was driving and my driving conditions. During the first leg of the trip I got mileage in the low 60s. I was driving at about the speed limit the whole way and very conscious of my driving to try to get better mileage. Unfortunately that did not keep up the whole time. I did quite a bit of city driving at various points which hurt my mileage quite a bit.

The insight does get very good mileage on surface streets due to the regenerative breaking but it only gets up in the 50's if one is careful with their driving habits, and on unfamiliar streets and with traffic it is difficult. At many points of the drive I was in a hurry either because I needed to get to my next destination quickly and speed makes a huge difference in mileage. The best mileage I got was the long flat straight of the 5 interstate in northern California. On that section I slowed down to about 55-60 and drafted behind semi trucks. By driving like that I was able to get MPG in the high 70's for hours of driving. The worst mileage part was in Oregon. I was driving faster there as I was more in a hurry, but also found that I couldn't get the same mileage up there as I could for similar speeds, and I believe because the roads are rougher in Oregon, but it might have all been in my head.

A successful trip to Portland and back without having to ford any rivers, no deaths due to dysentery and round trip for a fraction of the cost of a plane ticket.