Beta Don Posted July 20, 2019 Share Posted July 20, 2019 Several disadvantages too. Here in the US, diesel is much more expensive than gas. Refueling is a smelly affair and you'll need to wash your hands at a minimum when you're through. You really need to stay on top of filters and the water separator - Diesels don't like even a tiny bit of water. When they're running fine, they're great, but when they aren't, repairs are expensive. Diesel fuel doesn't behave well in very cold temperatures, so they are better in warmer climates. You pick your poison and you live with the advantages/disadvantages I read online last week that Ford has dropped the diesel option for 2020 TC's in North America, largely due to the economy/emissions issues Don Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G B L Posted July 21, 2019 Share Posted July 21, 2019 The extra expense of the diesel option makes selling enough units problematic for the North American TC market. If the diesel fuel is properly winterized, winter operation is not a problem. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fifty150 Posted July 21, 2019 Share Posted July 21, 2019 The North American market is dominated by gasoline. Politics. Money. Probably a combination of both. There's probably a very good reason why it's so difficult to sell diesel engines in The USA. Ever notice how many gas stations don't even sell diesel? Then there's the clean bio-diesel option. I live in a major metropolitan area. I can't find any within city limits. And it's just not an option for me to drive 25 miles to the nearest bio-diesel seller, then 25 miles back home. Who goes 50 miles out of their way to buy gas? I would buy diesel if it didn't cost more, and bio-diesel fuel was more widely available. Same reason why I don't own a car which is capable of E85. It cost more, and you can't buy the E85 anywhere. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dogbert62 Posted July 22, 2019 Share Posted July 22, 2019 All, 2017 TC wagon LWB w/2.5 I have tracked via on-board so it is at least relative... I generally stay at 22.5 mpg with mostly in town driving.. when I have taken it out for short road trips, I can gat up to 24.2.. took the TC on an extended road trip from Austin to Estes Park.. started at ~22.5... likely 24.5 when I hit the NM-CO boarder averaging 75mph on the open road.. hit Estes park at 25.1.. on the way home it climbed to 26.5 about the time I hit the NM-TX boarder with a 75mph speed on the open road.. it dropped to 25.8 when I pulled to my driveway in Austin... I pushed the speed up to 77-78mph and had a 25mph headwind.. the van was packed with my wife and I along with a couple light suitcases.. A/C was on Thoughts... —i am at least happy that the van got close to the 27mpg spec.. — wonder how many miles and how often the van is sampled for the on-board system — wonder if the ethanol percentages where different in CO than in Tx and NM causing some of the drop..... the drop did line up a bit with the last tank fill up CO... next time I will do a true mpg analysis and not rely on the van computer Regards Dogbert62 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fifty150 Posted July 23, 2019 Share Posted July 23, 2019 On 7/21/2019 at 7:06 PM, Dogbert62 said: I pushed the speed up to 77-78mph Not much of a push. When I get out onto the open road, where cops know everyone goes a little faster, my cruising speed is 80 in the slow lane. Yes. California still has highways with a 70 MPH speed limit. And yes, cruising at 80 is normal on those roads. You don't want to hear about how fast I used to drive on those roads when I had my 5.0. The Transit Connect easily cruises at 80 MPH. But the mileage isn't very good at that speed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dogbert62 Posted July 25, 2019 Share Posted July 25, 2019 All, yeah.. I was tempted to hit the gas pedal but was more interested in MPG... this does beg a couple more questions has anyone tried to correlate measured MPG to the dashboard average MPG? I assume it is somewhat tough without knowing the sampling rate and total miles in the average.. does anyone one know if there is a sweet spot for freeway MPG vs speed? Or has anyone maxed MPG to speed my guess is that it is fairly linear but if I get 27mpg at 60 and 12mpg at 75... I would tend to drive like a geezer... Dogbert62 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beta Don Posted July 25, 2019 Share Posted July 25, 2019 The optimal speed for best gas mileage is probably somewhere between 40 and 45 - Fast enough to allow the engine to pull it easily in 6th gear, but no faster. Any increase over that will cost you mpg's. Driving an EV, you can easily see this as every EV has a 'range meter' which calculates how far you can go (before the battery is depleted) based on how much energy you have used over the last 10 or 15 miles. Our little Mitsubishis will go about 100 miles at city speeds of 25 or 30 and about 75 or 80 miles at 40 or 45. Maybe 60 miles at 65 to 70, but going faster than that will cut your range to only 45 to 50 miles - It decreases dramatically above about 65. So, half as far at 75 as you can go at 25 or 30. Wind resistance at higher speeds is a range killer and in an ICE vehicle, that translates to lower gas mileage. So, if you're not in a hurry, slow down and you'll go farther on every gallon. And if you ARE in a hurry, maybe you should have left home 10 or 15 minutes earlier Don Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WillMartin Posted July 29, 2019 Author Share Posted July 29, 2019 One thing I have noticed about fuel economy is that it drops in the wintertime. There's more ethanol in the fuel during the winter. Ethanol has less energy content. I don't like it. But, politics says I have to use it. Oh, well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G B L Posted July 29, 2019 Share Posted July 29, 2019 The fuel economy has always dropped in the cold weather, the 10 percent ethanol just makes the drop bigger The speed wind resistance effect has always been there, as gas prices go up it becomes how fast for how much? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
desert_connect Posted July 30, 2019 Share Posted July 30, 2019 I just returned from trip of 4000 mi from southern Arizona to NW Washington and back in my '17 TC XLT van. Most of the speeds were in the 65-70 mph range, fastest & worst mpg was 80+ and slowest & best mpg was 50-60 mph. Best milage was 30.5, worst 25.0 and the overall trip average was 28.66 mpg. Most notable was when I returned to the 100+ temps in southern Nevada/Arizona my milage dropped off. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fifty150 Posted July 30, 2019 Share Posted July 30, 2019 (edited) Interesting that higher temperatures lowered your mileage. I suppose if you ran the van on a dyno, with cruise control set for 55 mph, you would great results. Edited July 30, 2019 by Fifty150 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
desert_connect Posted July 30, 2019 Share Posted July 30, 2019 2 hours ago, Fifty150 said: Interesting that higher temperatures lowered your mileage. I suppose if you ran the van on a dyno, with cruise control set for 55 mph, you would great results. I should have also mentioned that along with the higher temps is very low humidity. The low humidity is probably a larger factor than the higher temps. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WillMartin Posted August 1, 2019 Author Share Posted August 1, 2019 So, water injection? I only calculate by mileage and how much fuel I put in. The 2010 doesn't have an onboard calculator. The van will probably get its worst mileage tank this time. It's been a whole lot of lousy traffic and a bit of heavier than usual hauling. The up-side is that it's taking more than a month to get through the tank. I haven't driven much, relative, but what driving I have done has been stop and go and loaded down. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fifty150 Posted August 2, 2019 Share Posted August 2, 2019 Intake air temp is relevant to the vehicle operation. Isn't that why there's a sensor? Not to debate effectiveness of cold air intakes. How does the car's computer use the temperature to adjust air fuel ratio? The Transit Connect air box scoops air from the front grille, right? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beta Don Posted August 2, 2019 Share Posted August 2, 2019 Fuel injectors are electric switches. When they are switched 'On' they deliver a certain amount of fuel. A computer controls the time they are switched 'On' and it uses all sorts of parameters to calculate the exact number of milliseconds for each Intake cycle. The single most important parameter is the reading from the O2 sensor in the exhaust. By measuring the amount of unburned oxygen in the exhaust they can determine how rich or lean the engine is running. The next important parameter is from the mass airflow sensor - You can calculate a rough idea how much fuel you'll need by measuring how much air is being let into the engine - Floor it, demanding more power and the throttle position sensor gives the computer a 'heads up' that more air will soon be coming, so the computer responds with more milliseconds which means more gas. It's an ever fluctuation computation which changes from one RPM to the next As the governments CAFE standards got tighter and tighter, demanding more fuel efficient vehicles, the manufacturers began sensing every little thing which could improve fuel economy, including temperature (but I'm not so sure about humidity, though it could be measured in there somewhere too) to 'tweak' the computers program even more, all to improve fuel economy When you understand how a modern fuel injected engine works, it really gives you an understanding of how crude and imprecise the old carburetor system actually was - We *thought* that we really had carbs tweaked to fine tune exactly what the engine needed, but compared to a modern engine, all we were really doing was dumping fuel in one end and *hoping* we weren't flooding or starving the motor, because with a carb, things were almost never optimal. Since running too lean had terrible consequences, carbs always erred on the rich side of things. Ever walked behind a finely tuned, highly cammed engine loping along at idle? You can SMELL the raw gas coming from the exhaust, and yet when you stomped on it, that engine made TONS of horsepower, but if you ever let it get even slightly too lean, you'd need a whole new motor! Don Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Double Nickels Posted August 2, 2019 Share Posted August 2, 2019 I have heard that every car is tuned for fuel economy, and that there's a little performance left on the table. I wonder how much performance can be gained from custom tuning a Transit Connect. I would sacrifice a little mileage, for a little more power. In my old Mustang, performance gains were noticeable with all the mods. Of course, mileage went from bad to worse. I didn't care. If I cared, I would not have bought a 5 liter V8. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beta Don Posted August 9, 2019 Share Posted August 9, 2019 Fuel mileage depends most of all on how and where you drive it After I did my dash upgrade to the Titanium dash with the color LCD screen, I was a bit miffed to discover that the overall 27.8 average fuel economy number I'd been seeing for the last 15,000 miles was gone ? In it's place, the new dash was showing 19.3 mpg, which was the number from the Titanium my new dash had been 'rescued' from We had a 1,200 mile trip to do - 600 miles to Titusville Florida to pick up a used diesel motor home I had bought. I reset the average mpg and I drove it over averaging pretty close to 70, or just a little under and my wife drove it back following me in the motor home at 62 to 65 mph. Now that we're home, I was anxious to check our new number - 29.3 mpg over the past 1,200 miles!! This is largely flat land, average speeds of right around 65 and possibly 20 or 30 miles of stop and go city traffic - We had to deal with four separate traffic accidents which stopped traffic on all three lanes and we moved a car length at a time for several miles. At one point, a wreck closed I-295 completely around Jacksonville and all traffic got dumped downtown right at rush hour. If not for all those delays, I think we would probably have averaged 30 mpg Don Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WillMartin Posted August 11, 2019 Author Share Posted August 11, 2019 Well, it's official. My 2010 got less than 20 mpg last tank. It was coming. All stop and go, some of it loaded up. It still got more than 19 mpg. I kinda miss the big ol' Chevy's hauling capacity, but since that didn't get used very often, the efficiency is something I appreciate more. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mrtn Posted August 11, 2019 Share Posted August 11, 2019 Mine’s doing 22 mpg (mixed driving). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G B L Posted August 12, 2019 Share Posted August 12, 2019 6 hours ago, mrtn said: Mine’s doing 22 mpg (mixed driving). Propane right Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fifty150 Posted August 12, 2019 Share Posted August 12, 2019 True cost is cost per mile. Miles per gallon will vary depending on fuel type. Even unleaded gas has different blends in different markets. I still believe in doing the math to figure out MPG. I don't think the dashboard readout is very accurate. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mrtn Posted August 12, 2019 Share Posted August 12, 2019 Both, gasoline and LPG. Also my dashboard readout correlates precisely with fill-up method. That's for gasoline. Not possible to do with LPG as there's no concrete shutoff moment. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eddy Kilowatt Posted August 12, 2019 Share Posted August 12, 2019 14 hours ago, Fifty150 said: I don't think the dashboard readout is very accurate. Mine's optimistic by 8-10% (i.e. Not Very Accurate), observed over several tankfuls. 2015 w/ 2.5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WillMartin Posted August 16, 2019 Author Share Posted August 16, 2019 Mine is completely accurate - it is how much fuel goes into the tank and how many miles I went. Calculator? It's my head. OK. Maybe not quite that accurate. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fifty150 Posted August 16, 2019 Share Posted August 16, 2019 Accurate as the Daisy Duke Dyno. When I wear tight, short shorts, I can feel the power from the stickers on my Honda. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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