one thing also to check is your exhustis she breathing check to see you rool easy a hung brake or low fluid bad bearing just put the car in nueat and coast 5 to 10 sec if she slows up quick you will see the different now so the other thing is to seafoam or its called power tune merq out boards or boat store will have it good shint

 

You're just being dumb now. It's very simple. When you fill your tank up, look at how many gallons it took. Majority of people fill up shortly after the "check gages" light appears. That's usually around 14 gallons. How the hell are you supposed to get an average number of miles per tank using 16 gallons as the benchmark? Do you propose people continuiously run their car out of gas?

 

He is not suggesting that you run your car out of gas. That would be impractical. And bad for the fuel pump.

His point is exactly the opposite. You can fill up whenever you want to and still make an accurate calculation of miles per tank. As long as you always fill it up all the way, you can do the following:

Fill tank all the way, press trip odometer reset, drive as far as you like, and then fill up again. Now, even if you fill up when the tank is 1/3 full, you can still figure out miles per tank. Suppose you drove 150 miles, and it took 10 gallons to fill up. That means that you got 15 miles per gallon, because 150/10 = 15. And since the tank is 16 gallons, you multiply 15x16, so, it means that you would have gotten 240 miles per tank.

If another member went 410 miles, and it took 15.8 gallons, then they got 25.9mpg [410/15.8] And they could multiply 25.9 x 16, and get the miles per tank, which is 414 miles per tank.

Now, if these two people are comparing the difference between how many miles they get on a tank, and the first guy says he got 150 miles on a tank, and the second guy says he got 410, they would think that there is a big problem with the first car. But if they both consider that there are 16 gallons in a tank, then the first guy's number is 240, and the second guy is 414. It is not so bad a difference. Maybe the first guy has a heavy foot.


If we all tell each other how many miles we get per tank, and we all have different ideas about how many gallons is in a "tank", and a tank to one member is 13 gallons and a tank to another member is 16 gallons, it is pointless. That is like saying that 4th gen f-cars are front wheel drive, since you drive with the steering wheel, and the steering wheel turns the front wheels. That may be true to someone, somewhere, but it doesn't help us as a group, to determine if our cars are running right or not.

I thought it was 15.5 gallons. That is what it was on third gen.

 

I just seen this post, but getting in on the action....

02z28 A4 3.73's 2 out the left setup for the exhaust
tuned.

Get about 9 - 11 miles to the gallon.
I can get about 210miles a tank, and that is driving like Granny does. Not really accellerating.
I see alot of people saying they are getting around 25 miles to the gallon on
A4's.. I have not seen that much on stock ones since that is a bit overkill.
I think stock ones really get more like 18 20 MPG... IMO.
I cant even get my wifes pontiac g6.. v6 to get 25 MPG on the highway, more or less a v8 engine that has some mods.

 

Yes, I understand how to calculate MPG, but that is not what is being discussed here. This entire thread has been about miles per tank. Nobody is going to use 16 gallons as their reference. If the original thread had asked in reference to MPG, that my answer would have been about 17 MPG city driving and as much as 29 MPG all highway driving. In the end, I don't think he has anything to worry about.

 

Well I think i am dumber now after reading that post.


I have a 2000 Firehawk 6 speed w/ 37,000 miles and I get 200 per tank. That what I freakin got with my 89 T/A w/ 305TBI. Most of my driving is highway. I seafoamed it didn't smoke. I put new NGK plugs and MSD wires on it, didn't make a difference. I have cleaned the throttle body. It has a lid and FTRA. The only thing I have not done is change the fuel filter. I doubt 100 more miles per tank is hiding in there.

I was really mad about the mileage after I bought the car.

 

I get 52 miles per gallon and 700 miles per tank on my dd. Anybody with a long daily commute needs one of these like me

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/Volks...spagenameZWDVW

All the way to the bank. More money saved on fuel=more mods for the 'Hawk

 

Alright. I've tried to explain it to you as simple as possible. Now, it's just getting out of hand.

Are you an idiot?

These cars CLICK the gas off automatically when you go for a fill up. It's very simple to calculate your mpg to near-perfection. Fill your tank up until it clicks, reset your trip odometer, fill it back up until it clicks again and then divide the miles you've gone by the number of gallons you refilled with. Take your mpg and multiply it by the number of gallons in your gas tank. THAT is your miles per tank.

These are NOT 14 gallon gas tanks, so how are you calculating your miles per tank when there are still 2 gallons of gas left? How can you seriously sit there and say "I get XXX miles per tank" when there is still gas left in the tank?

You're wrong. People have thought this through. What you have given us is not your "miles per tank." It is your "miles until the gas light comes on." Most cars can still drive another 40+ miles when that light comes on, so how can you sit here and tell us you get XXX miles per tank when you can still drive 40+ miles with the amount of gas left?



Wow. It's bad enough you actually run your car until the gas light comes on. That's just asking for a busted fuel pump and a filthy fuel filter. But the fact that you're arguing about a definition when you're clearly incorrect...it's seriously like arguing that 2+2=10. Argue all you want. You'll never be right.

 

Thank you, Andre. Grade school math is a hell of a thing

Seriously though, glad someone gets it

I think these cars either have a 15.8 or a 16.2 gallon gas tank. I don't remember exactly. I know the 1998 F-body's had a slightly smaller gas tank, too. The 1998's had a metal gas tank and the 1999-2002 F-body's had a slightly larger plastic tank. The exact volume of the tank for the 1998's and 1999-2002's escape me. Maybe the 1998's had a 15.8 and the 1999-2002's had a 16.2...perhaps someone will chime in and correct me.

 

This thing degenerated into a dumbfest very quickly.

My GM owner's manual says my tank size on my 2002 is 16.8 gallons. The importance of that is to estimate a range of how many miles the car can travel before it must have gas to continue on. Fortunately, GM didn't try something as silly as including a MPT (miles per tank) rating anywhere in their literature.

The nonsense some people are engaging in regarding fuel usage here is dizzying. There is only one way to reasonably measure fuel usage and that is to fill your tank at a particular pump, reset your tripmeter to zero, drive the car under "real world" conditions, return to the same gas pump, fill the car the same way it was done initially, record the gallons of fuel it takes to fill the tank, record the miles driven, divide the miles driven by the fuel it took to fill the tank, and the result is MPG. From that number, if you want to calculate the miles you could drive on a "tank" under similar conditions, you could do that, and it would have some meaning, but the estimates and guestimates employed by some around here are far less than meaningful.

First, the gas tank gauge isn't accurate. I can drive 70 miles around town before my gauge drops to 3/4 of a tank. Now, using the BS method I've seen in this post, I could multiply the 70 by 4 and I would get 280, but since the gauge should hit E (empty) with a reserve of 3 gallons, I would divide 280 by 13.8 and then multiply that by 16.8 to get my "Miles per Tank", which would be 340.87 MPT. But that's BS. The reason being, if I actually fill my tank when the gauge drops to 3/4 and I do the math, my real MPG is 13-15, because I've done it hundreds of times. So take the average of 14 MPG and multplly that by 16.8 and you get 235.2 MPT (miles per tank). Now, look at the numbers. There's a substantial difference! Using the widely and recklessly employed estimated/guestimated method I get 341 MPT and using simple math, I get 235 MPT. Doing simple math again, by dividing 341 by 235, you can see that there is a 45% error that results from the estimating/guestimating fuel gauge method.

I know the real world mileage my car gets around town and on the open road using simple math. I've done it many many times. Just like so many other people who choose to use real, accurate, simple math, I know that I actually get 13 to 24 MPG, depending on whether I'm driving around town (city driving), or I'm driving on the open highway.

If you want to convert that to an MPT, it is 218 to 403 MPT. But that doesn't mean Jack to me, and it doesn't mean Jack to my wallet either. I do 95% of my driving around town with stop and go driving and short jaunts on the interstate and My MPG hangs around 14 under those conditions. That's the truth and that's the number that matters - if MPG matters to someone who buys a car in essence for its looks and high performance.

If some of you want to rationalize that you've got a world-beater on youir hands and that you're saving the earth with the phenominal mileage you eak out of your LS F-Body based car because you use your gas gauge to inflate your fuel mileage, go ahead and live in your dilusional state.

I'll stick with MPG derived from simple basic math. You should too!

As for the original poster, just calculate your MPG accurately without relying on the fuel gauge and you're more likely than not going to see that your fuel usage is NOT out of the ordinary.

 

Hard to figure out miles per tank when you don't know the size of the tank.

 

Is this seriously being argued? The only way this will be figured out is todrop your tank and completely empty it, carry it up to the pump, pump until it's completely full. Put it back on the car. Drive until you run out of gas. Calculate. Then let someone argue that vapors remained in the tank at fill-up causing an extreme skewing of the numbers. Repeat until death.

 

I agree, this point is kind of stupid. It's not miles per tank it's freakin miles per gallon. You fill up, hit the trip meter, drive it till it's low, fill it up, look at the trip meter, look at the amount of fuel you just bought. Divide. Repeat.

Damn people it's division.

And I think when people say, how many miles to a tank, thats what they mean....

 

lol I don't get better than about 210 miles out of a tank on my m5 v6 street/highway and my car is in great condition

 

Just did some all highway driving for the first time with the 408ci motor. i got 22 mpg

 

---lol.

 

when i bought my car it was 100% bone stock down to the factory lid ( 99 z a4 3.23's )

ive never seen my gas light come on 1 time b/c i ve never gotten it much less then 1/4 tank too so figure that into all my mpg ratings:

1. i got @260-270 per tank when driving like an average joe a few time as much as 300, when i drove more spirited it was closer to 230-250 where i lived at the time was a mix of city/highway

after i did mods basic bolt ons i.e: lid tb fra 3in cutout hpp3 tune !air !egr slp bellow m85mm maf it went down a little 250 - 260 ave joe driving, spirited 220 - 230
also at the time around then i moved again, a lil more city driving then befor so thats a lil bit why the averages went down.

then i got my lvl 2 tranny and 3400 stall. living in the same place as above the same kinda driving. 210 - 220 at the very best usually arond 190 - 200. the vertor in the city was bad on the mpg but worth it for me, and if i got all highway was still in the 300+ mpg range which was nice when i went on trips.

now that ive gotten my current setup thats in the sig im still trying to figure my miles per tank out, i just moved again so ill see a lil more highway then from my 2nd house mentioned. im probly looking at @ 180'ish.

there are sooo many factors in gas milage other then just city/highway
how you drive, weather conditions, road conditions ( flat, hilly, mountains, sea level, average speed limit ) how fat you accelerate, stall, gears, tire size, rim weight the list can go on an on.

it doesnt sound to me that your ave is that bad

 

Allright my last tank of gas was the middle grade-plus. I let it go down to below the E mark this time instead of a couple miles after the light came on. Filled up took 14.5 gallons and on this tank I got 247 miles I think. So that comes out to 17 mpg which isn't so bad-wish these tanks held a little more fuel my friends vette holds 18.5. I do have a slow leak in one of my rear tires so its prob about 15-20 psi-I need to get it plugged-just haven't had time. I am still going to do the seafoam when it gets a little warmer here. Thanks for all the post guys, it amazing how much variation is on these cars. Especially guys who are stock.

 

It's bad enough you spew your bullshit into every header thread on the board, but now it seems as if you do it in every post you type. First off, the cars don't click anything off. The gas pumps have an automatic shut off. The original poster was speaking in real world terms. Do you have any level of reading comprehension? You don't get real world mile per tank figures using the actual tank capacity as your benchmark. As others have stated, MPG is the only true way to measure your fuel consumption, but that is not what he asked for. Would it have been better to use MPG, yes, but again, that's not what he asked for. Just as you say most cars still have 40 miles left in the tank when the light comes on, you can make an intelligent observation as to how many real world miles per tank you get. Please explain how driving until the check gages light comes on is "asking for a busted fuel pump and a filthy fuel filter." The fuel pump in our cars pulls from the bottom of the tank. It doesn't matter how much fuel you have in the car, the pump still pulls from the exact same place. Please stop posting misinformation on LS1tech. This site is used to spread real technical information.

 

This is not an argument in favor of either party arguing her, but rather information....

Running low on fuel may cause the pump to burn up prematurely due to the fact that the "design" of our tanks uses the fuel to cool the pump. The longer you run it at a low level where there isn't enough fuel to cool it properly, then you run the risk of burning it out faster. This is not to say it certainly will, but it can. I know I've done it, but that was on a Walbro, which I would think is better than GM... but still crap.