I wanted to find out my gas mileage, so I put in 6.37 gallons ($10 at $1.57/gal) when I was almost on empty and drove around until I was back on the empty mark. Afterwards I checked my odometer to find that I had only driven 120 miles on those 6.37 gallons. After some more quick math this puts my gas mileage at 18.828 miles per gallon, city driving.

Now please keep in mind that this is an Accord that we're talking about, as you can all probably guess from the fact that I'm on the Accord message board.

Now I don't know what to do to improve my mileage except to make sure that my tires are fully inflated all the time. Besides that, I'm clueless. Why would my car have such horrible mileage in the first place? What can I do to fix this?

 

There are a couple of things for this, but you gotta understand that a 2003 with poor gas mileage is not the same as an 86 with that problem. Further, just gaging yourself on 10$ of gas is not a sufficient test for this. You could have gotten bad fuel that burnt up real fast. You must to look at multiple full gas tanks to be accurate.

So, first, need more info: year, mileage, last tune up, any other symptoms (engine), etc..

fs

 

Sometimes a tune up is in order. When was the last time you changed your spark plugs, wires? Disctributor, cap? What about the o2 sensor?

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by Fille-Au-Fish &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">I wanted to find out my gas mileage, so I put in 6.37 gallons ($10 at $1.57/gal) when I was almost on empty and drove around until I was back on the empty mark. Afterwards I checked my odometer to find that I had only driven 120 miles on those 6.37 gallons. After some more quick math this puts my gas mileage at 18.828 miles per gallon, city driving.

Now please keep in mind that this is an Accord that we're talking about, as you can all probably guess from the fact that I'm on the Accord message board.

Now I don't know what to do to improve my mileage except to make sure that my tires are fully inflated all the time. Besides that, I'm clueless. Why would my car have such horrible mileage in the first place? What can I do to fix this?</TD></TR></TABLE>
$1.57?!
Where in the wolrd do you live?!
It's $2.05 around here and that is at the cheap generic places for regular grade!

 

sometime is it nice to live in GA. We have the cheapes gas in the country

 

It's a '91, ~164000 miles.

Back in the end of December, about three months ago, I had it in the shop because of a bad transmission. Well while they were doing that the spark plugs got flushed with oil so they had to clean out all of that. I got new sparks, a new cover gasket, got my front end steering aligned, and the transmission fixed so it wasn't so clunky.

About three weeks ago it was brought in and the air filter was checked (a dead squirrel was removed along with about 200 acorns) and the PCV valve was replaced, seeing as how mine was solid almost to the core. It was a wonder that I was getting any air to the engine at all.

I'll check out the Distributer Cap and O2 sensors tomorrow. Thank you.