If you can find it. Every high elevation place I have driven, the regular is 86 octane. The desert floor elevation here in Southern New Mexico is 4400 feet. All the stations around here sell 86 octane gas. I don't know the exact reason other than the air is dryer and thinner.

 

timohapi - I alway allow the nozzle to auto shut off once, then i'm done filling the tank. My wife won't allow me to run the tank low. I usually fill between 1/4 and 1/2 tank. I have seen it reset to 585 miles. I don't remember any higher but I don't pay much attention to the miles left. Its the higher gas mileage i'm after.

It took a while but I found a top tier station here in town with a near level pump. The drive does tilt out away from the pump. I had filled the car using some thin boards on the low side. I checked my gas mileage that way for months. Then not using the boards I found the gas mileage readings were the same.

Could be the more level drive at the pump may make the miles left reading more accurate.

rburt07

 

You are right..........i forgot about 86 octane gas! Thanks for pointing that out. I have seen it before........i was TDY to Kirtland AFB NM back in 2000 for NCO leadership school and remember seeing it there in the local area. It has been a while since then and i retired from active duty Air Force back in 2003 so many things have changed!!

 

I have given up on even looking at the distance to empty indication - it is so ridiculously low compared to reality, and is extremely inconsistent, even when the variation on FE is relatively low from one tank to the next.

I now reset my trip A odometer every time I fill (and always stop the fill at the first click), and wait until the fuel empty light comes on. Once I see that, I do a mental calculation based on my current tank FE and distance travelled since fill up to know how much further I can go. I give myself a buffer of 50Km to allow for reasonable error. This has worked fine for me so far - when I fill up, I'm consistently within a liter or two of what I expect to be. If I can do an estimate that reliably, why the heck can't the onboard computer?

timohapi- If you want to use premium, go right ahead, but in the best possible case you are throwing money away needlessly.

 

I've seen the same thing. It usually picks up my mileage from the previous tank, give or take a few miles.

It gives me pride to kick the computer's a$$ by driving more than it thinks I can!

 

The 86 octane fuel that you commonly find at higher elevations works at those elevations because the air is thinner, so there is not as much compression pressure. At lower elevations, you have higher pressure, and higher octane is needed to prevent knocking. The only time you might need to put higher octane than regular into a car that is designed for regular is if you are buying the fuel in the mountains, and intend to drive down toward sea level on that tank. If the "regular" fuel knocks while driving around the same town where it was bought, just avoid that gas station in the future.

 

Duh? Why do you insist on driving past the point where the idiot light tells you its time to add fuel? There's a reason why the engineers decided the reserve capacity for this design. They didn't just decide to carry 20 pounds of extra fuel around for no reason. Just add fuel when the car says it needs fuel, or before, and let it keep the fuel reserve that it is programmed to keep.

 

Wow.........finally some "common sense" on this subject. Why does everything need to be a huge issue?? Just because you can drive 560 miles on a tank.........doesn't mean you should!! The old saying KISS(keep it simple stupid) applies here as well!

 

I absolutely agree with KISS in principle. It's not applying here. On any car I've ever had before, the 'idiot light' was telling me: "You're an idiot if you don't fill up at your first opportunity!" - hence the name. With the TCH however, the light comes on when I can go another 250Km, and then the gauge tells me my range is 0 when I can go up to another 150 or more easily. How do those indications reflect common (or any or type of) sense?