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I drove my wife to shopping and dinner tonight. I was disappointed in my mileage, which was only 33+ mpg driving to Costco, and 13.9 mpg driving a couple of blocks to dinner. So, I decided to pad my mileage on the way home. I chose a route that takes me to the top of a hill, and got 69 mpg on the ~10 mile trip home. That kept my tank mileage up at 47.8 mpg. Am I alone in playing the mileage game this way, or do some of you do the same thing?

That is an issue I often wrestle with.
Do you drive extra to get good mileage?

In your example if the extra distance was not burning fuel but just costing down a hill. Is that padding?

I would say your padding if you use fuel to drive extra distance you would not have driven, just to push up the numbers.

Unless… your doing it for educational or research purposes, with the goal to benefiting long term mileage by you and or others.
The 50 state FE record trip is an example of an educational / research use of fuel. It shows people what can be done, pushing the idea of FE driving.

Note: I Padded my mileage this morning myself. :(
I could have dropped off my kid at the bus stop for school. But… my mileage has been down, so I said how about I drop you off at school today (8 more miles), it’s cold so she said GREAT. Why did I do it? The 8 extra miles warmed up the engine and I ended up 3-4 mpg over what I had been getting. I padded….

The most direct route home is about 9.85 miles, per Yahoo maps. The route I took home is the other half of a parallelogram, perhaps .5 mile farther, but it has the advantage of a long downhill and much less traffic, going through an industrial park, and avoiding the freeway completely. I took the freeway going to dinner, but only for about 3 miles, with most of that being downhill mileage

I would say that as long as the overall amount of fuel used was not more(less would be even better) than the other route, it wasn't padding.

Hi, Larry. That's my criteria as well.

I drive a bit over 22mi each way for work when the shortest route is a bit over 17mi. In exchange though, I'm getting 40%+ improvement in fuel economy. That's not padding. ;)

The only thing I do that might be considered padding is drive a slightly longer route. This is just to make up for the warm up hit in the mornings. By driving 5 miles further I actually end up getting better FE over the course of a day.

There are a couple routes I could take for my commute. The one that gives me the best numbers is the longest and bottom line is it would use more gas to get better MPG numbers. I have been using the second to the shortest which gives me close to the lowest tank MPG but uses the least fuel each week. The differences are not dramatic, one or three mpg’s per tank. Thinking on it, I did take one route, 15 miles longer and made 2 stops for shopping. I got the highest MPG for a trip that I ever had. Still used more gas in the overall so for me it is out of the question.

I did these right after getting the Yaris so maybe next spring, when the weather warms, I should try them all again for a week and see if my skills have improved enough to make any of them more cost effective.