Sunday, August 26, 2007

In a car...

I'm on I-90/39 in Wisconsin in between corn fields, using my carpool friend Mark's Sprint phone to connect to the Internet. I'm getting over 1.1 MBit/sec down and 90 KBit/sec up. In a car. In the middle of nowhere. I can't believe how good this is, especially compared to my T-Mobile Dash with dial-up quality EDGE. And his data plan is $15/month, compared to my $30/month. Weak, T-Mobile, weak.

Speed test

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Car facts

I turned in my leased car on Monday (after a scare where I thought it was stolen but really the city towed it and lost the record of it having been towed, but the cops suggested additional places to look after filing the police report...long story). In it, I kept a log of every tank of gas. Anal retentive, I know. I got it from my Grandpa Coe; on cross country car trip vacations, he would keep a log and compute his mileage—using a slide rule, I should add. For whatever reason, I decided to keep a log with my first new car. Anyway, 4 years, 101 tanks and 27,547 miles later, I am no longer a car owner. I decided to type the odometer readings and fuel volumes into Excel and run some statistics.

  • 2003 Honda Civic LX Coupe with a 5-speed manual transmission.
  • Year 1: 11,873 miles, 38 tanks of gas, 355.62 gallons, 32.30 mpg average.
  • Year 2: 9,364 miles, 37 tanks of gas, 291.30 gallons, 31.62 mpg average.
  • Year 3: 2,766 miles, 13 tanks of gas, 95.46 gallons, 30.30 mpg average.
  • Year 4: 3,544 miles, 13 tanks of gas, 113.24 gallons, 32.82 mpg average.
  • Overall mileage: 31.90 mpg average, 41.20 max, 23.79 min, 4.02 standard deviation.
  • Total fuel consumption: 855.62 gallons (which weighs 5,016 lbs).
  • Longest distance on one tank: 387.00 miles on 10.55 gallons for 36.68 mpg.
  • Graph of miles driven year over year.
  • Graph of mileage of every tank of gas.

I wonder what my Grandpa would say. I bet he'd smile, chuckle and be pretty darn impressed with what Excel could do.