Fuel Mileage Experiment 2, Week 2
I wrapped up phase two of the second fuel mileage experiment last Friday, anticipating a trip to Roosevelt where I would have to fill with gas and forget the receipt (which I did). Luckily I ended the experiment ahead of time. Here’s the results:
- Miles driven: 463
- Fuel used: 17.863
- Average MPG: 25.92
This seemed pretty much the same as the fall-off I’d seen in fuel efficiency the last time I did the experiment, so I looked into it a bit further. Actually it is amazingly similar.
| 2002 Pontiac Grand Prix | 2003 Nissan 350Z | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Slow Driving | Normal Driving | Slow Driving | Normal Driving | |
| Fun Level | Lame | Acceptable | Embarrassingly Lame | Fun |
| MPG | 29.05 | 27.69 | 27.25 | 25.92 |
| MPG Difference | 1.36 | 1.33 | ||
A funny thing (only sort-of related, but worth discussing): After I got my 350Z, my director decided to show me up by buying a brand new 370Z. He even let me drive it, and it is definitely a better car. But karma is real, and he got his first speeding ticket in his new 370Z only a few days after he bought it.
Anyway, he said that he really wasn’t going that much faster than anyone else on the road, but he was singled out because of his car. It appears that having a sports car will make you more inclined to get a ticket, not only because it is so easy to speed, but also because our policeman friends are more likely to pull you over in a sports car. It isn’t that they are discriminating against sports cars so much as that they are choosing to enforce the laws more stringently against sports cars simply because they are sports cars. 
Anyway, it appears that in a sad twist of fate, there’s an irony of sports car ownership, which is that I actually have to drive SLOWER than the other people in order to avoid getting ticketed, even though that lifted 4×4 that just blew by me at 85 is definitely much more poorly equipped to negotiate the freeway at those speeds than I am in my 350Z.
No matter. It’s still a blast to drive it.
