How to Calculate Your Gas Mileage
Before we even talk about how to save money on gas you need to know how to calculate your gas mileage. In fact you really don't even know how much gas is costing YOU until you have calculated how many miles you get per gallon of fuel. It is a very simple to figure, but most people have no idea where to start. It's one of those things in life that we deem very important, complaining about how high the price of gasoline is, but not realizing what our MPG (miles per gallon) is.
The first step is fill up your tank, completely. I would recommend looking in your automobile's owner's manual to find out how many gallons of gas your tank will hold. This will help you to know whether or not you truly have a full tank of gas, which is vital to an accurate calculation.
Once you have completely filled up reset your travel odometer to zero. If you don't have a travel odometer, simply write down the current mileage on your main odometer. Knowing the starting mileage of this current tank of fuel will be very important in knowing your gas mileage. The next steps will take place once it is time to fill up again. If you are performing this calculation while driving long distances on the highway or interstate you will probably have the best gas mileage at that time. So, to get a better picture of what your vehicle's true MPG you may want to continue your typical driving habits.
When it's time to gas up your tank again you'll need to once again completely fill up the tank. Once the tank is full write down how many gallons it took to fill up the tank. The gallons are typically located below the price on the fuel pump.
Also, write down how many miles you have driven since the last fill up, which should be on your travel odometer (If no travel odometer, simply subtract the mileage at the time of the last fill up from the mileage on this fill up).
Now, you have all the information you need to calculate your gas mileage. Here's the formula.
number of miles driven / number of gallons used
For example: If you drove 300 miles on a tank of gas that has 20 gallons in it, then your miles per gallon is 15 (300/15=20).
To summarize, here are the steps of how to calculate your gas mileage.
- Fill up your tank
- Reset your travel odometer to zero
- At next fill up, completely fill up the tank again
- Calculate miles driven
- Calculate number of gallons used
- Divide number of miles driven by number of gallons used
If you are interested in saving several hundreds of dollars per month by reducing your fuel costs, then you'll want to read about this guy in California that runs his car on water. He calls it "Water4Gas."
