We just got back from a weekend trip, during which I gathered a few interesting bits of data. Our '05 FEH is a couple of months old, with somewhere between 1K and 5K miles on it. Up to now, I have been doing basically rural driving, with a little "city" driving (low speed, flat terrain, lots of short stops - mileage heaven) thrown in, and have been averaging about 30 mpg (lower when it was colder, and when traffic has required more aggressive driving than I would have chosen on my own; higher when conditions are ideal, as they often are on my daily 30-minutecommute).

I thought I'd probably get less than that on the highway, about 300 miles or so at 65-70 miles per hour, with a fair number of hills as we drove through the mountains in PA, and A/C on most of the time. But lo and behold, on the way down (Ithaca NY to Baltimore MD, fresh tank), we arrived in B'more with the gauge reading 31.8 mpg! The next 100 miles or so, on the beltway and other highways around the city (much hillier than I'd remembered from my childhood), we lost mpg, ending the tank at 30.5. Overall, I was pleased with the highway mileage, which beat the EPA estimate of 29 for my AWD model. Also, I found it interesting that if the gauge is to be believed, my FEH got better mileage on the open highway than it does "around town" - though most of my "around town" driving is not true "city" driving.

Coming back, however, I learned another thing - weight really does matter. We were loaded, with about 200 extra pounds of tools, furniture, etc., and traversing the same route in reverse (direction, not gear ), we only got about 29.2 (according to the gauge, again on a fresh tank but it's not empty yet). The only thing different was the extra load, so that seems to make a difference.

This prompted some speculation and discussion in the family about how "they" come up with the EPA mileage estimates. Could someone point me to a source for learning more about the conditions used in determining those numbers? Is the driving done on a track, on flat or hilly terrain, with what kind of a load in the car, etc.? TIA!

C.