Wondering why people complain that Yaris' cant get good mileage?!

[Zaphod]

Originally Posted by daf62757

I have often wondered how so many can get such fantastic mileage yet I still get slightly under 40MPG. Makes me wonder if there aren't some tall tales told here!

Stop and go can really hurt your mileage. When I'm doing city driving, I do a lot of compression braking (manual transmission), I time the lights and maintain constant speeds wherever possible. Engine braking with your foot off of the gas shuts off fuel completely so it's even better than idling in neutral! Of course knowing that, you can start off with more of your friction brake earlier to stay in compression braking for longer ;)

When you think about it, if you just reduce the number of times you even need to accelerate, it's even better than accelerating slowly. Very few people drive like that, if you're like the other 90% out there you just follow nose to bumper, mimicking the car in front of you with very little space or time to do anything different.

So knowing that, you should always be paying enough attention to what's going on in front of you to know when you need to start gliding in neutral to slow down, or when you need to start engine braking, always keeping things as smooth as possible for any cars behind you. As a rule of thumb, one should very very rarely need to use friction brakes on the highway. Thinking ahead, paying attention and driving more proactively is the key here, which is actually safer then following bumper to bumper and reacting.

You have to remember that your mileage really starts to drop off after 55, so I like to keep it between 50 and 60, in fact when there's no traffic behind me, I like to make it a point to allow the car to drop to 50 at the crest of a hill, and speed up no faster than 60 at the bottom, making small adjustments to that accelerator pedal where necessary. If there are downhill slopes that allow me to maintain the speed limit at 60 in neutral, I'll do it. And of course I'll use less gas on hills approaching areas where I know I can actually gain speed in neutral. And of course I'll even throw it in 5th gear and use DFCO when I know it will maintain it's speed, essentially using no fuel at all and holding the speed limit.

For me the real limiting factor for my fuel efficiency is that my trips are usually too short to allow the engine warm up enough. Heck, if you're mostly doing short trips like me and you do a lot of city driving you might be right on.

It's really all up to the individual and their driving conditions, but I can tell you from 1st hand experience it's very easy to achieve 50mpg on long trips if you can manage to keep the speed down.