Itty Bitty Rants

Infrequent posts about stuff.

Adding it all up

When I got my new (to me) 2003 Golf TDI in April, I decided that it was high time to actually keep a fuel mileage log to keep track of how things were going. Having tried all sorts of electronic versions in the past, I decided to go old school and got a notepad and pen to keep in the car for each fill up. Unsurprisingly, I've been keeping up very well and only drove off once without getting all the details, most of which were recoverable from the receipt and reseting the trip counter immediately when I realized my mistake just a few blocks down the road.



Not too long after I got started with the mileage journal, Google released their Spreadsheets beta and I have been using that to calculate actual mpg and all sorts of other neat statistics from data provided by the journal. For example, as of today my Averages section reads as follows:
<tr>
  <td>
    <strong>Gallons</strong>
  </td>
  
  <td>
    <strong>Price</strong>
  </td>
  
  <td>
    <strong>$pg</strong>
  </td>
  
  <td>
    <strong>Trip</strong>
  </td>
  
  <td>
    <strong>Mpg</strong>
  </td>
  
  <td>
    <strong>Mi Per Day</strong>
  </td>
  
  <td>
    <strong>Days</strong>
  </td>
  
  <td>
    <strong>$pMi</strong>
  </td>
</tr>

<tr>
  <td>
    11.92
  </td>
  
  <td>
    $35.01
  </td>
  
  <td>
    $2.93
  </td>
  
  <td>
    522
  </td>
  
  <td>
    44
  </td>
  
  <td>
    77
  </td>
  
  <td>
    11
  </td>
  
  <td>
    $0.07
  </td>
</tr>
As I was reading through the morning haul in my [feed reader](http://www.google.com/reader) I ran across a link to a new wiki called [WikiCars](http://wikicars.org) and ran across their list of the top [high mileage cars](http://wikicars.org/en/High_Mileage_Vehicles) and noticed that they didn't have the VW TDI vehicles listed, and went ahead and did what any good wiki browser should do and added them after creating an account.



That site howerver led me on to [http://fueleconomy.gov](http://fueleconomy.gov) site, which I seem to end up browsing through an awful lot where I found something I hadn't seen before: a pretty decent [online mileage tracking application](https://www.fueleconomy.gov/mpg)! My only complaint with it so far is that it doesn't allow nearly as much customization as my spreadsheet, but the big advantage is that you can share your data with other users on the site so that on the next update cycle, you should see a "MN" in the current [shared mileage info for 2003 VW Golf TDI (manual trans)](https://www.fueleconomy.gov/mpg/MPG.do?action=mpgData&#038;vehicleID=18610&#038;details=on&#038;browser=true) on the site.



Ideally I think it would be interesting to share mileage information with friends directly but I think the biggest problem is that I just don't know how many people keep detailed information and would be willing and fastidious about entering it online.