Track Your Gas Mileage Online

Published Oct 5th 2007, 12:15pm by Jody DeVere in Featured Articles

I confess. I'm a freak. I track my car's fill-ups, every one of them, in a logbook. The gas receipts tucked between the pages show the price per gallon as well as the total paid for each tank, and a handy little spreadsheet I created in Excel helps me track my fuel economy. I also record my maintenance in there. I have two of these logbooks that track every single one of my Honda Accord's 136,930 miles per gallon. I did the same thing for the car I owned before this one.

So, when the link to trackyourgasmileage.com was sent to me, I really wanted to love this site. After all, this interactive website was designed to help freaks like me keep track of our car's gas consumption, graphing it on a functional little chart display; it will also export that data in a csv file format so I can import it into my own spreadsheet for my own neurotic purposes. And not just one car, but users can track the data for any collection of compact cars, trucks, or motorbikes in their garage, and it will automatically present them with each vehicle's information in regular text and as historical graphs.

Doing this allows fanatics like me to compare monthly consumption, track our gas costs, and monitor our car's general health by observing trends in economy. Cool! Or so I hoped.

With great enthusiasm, I quickly logged in to the site. Joyfully, I created a profile and a nickname for my car, and selected my units of measurement. (US gallons, miles, and dollars. It's obvious this is an international site, as users can also choose liters, kilometers, and European money systems.) But as I began to enter my last few tanks of gas from my logbooks, I noticed a disturbing pattern: The gas mileage returns were wrong. The 13-gallon/281-mile tank I bought on June 22 displayed 50.56 miles per gallon. Huh? A quick reference to my Excel spreadsheet showed a more accurate number should be 21.43 mpg. Each of my preliminary tanks returned some goofy number that was impossibly wrong.

THEN, after entering my most recent 10 tanks of gas, something else happened. The MPG numbers were displaying correctly on the handy graph! When I went back in to check my figures, the fuel economy was correct, but the rest of the tank data (volume and distance) was now goofy.

So there you have it: It COULD BE a cool site, if I could figure it out. Why don't you give it a try, and let me know how it works for you?

By Brandy Schaffels
Contributing editor and fuel economy fanatic