Kentucky Fisherman
08-08-2008, 01:01 PM
I just found cleanmpg.com this morning and can already tell I'm gonna love this site. I'm a geek by nature and somewhat by profession as I work in an IT communications shop at the headquarters of a major health benefits company. I currently drive a 2003 Ford Escape that averages about 19/23 across the various seasons.
I talked to Wayne a bit ago and told a story that he encouraged me to post to the forums. I was asking about the ScanGauge and mentioned that at least 20 years ago I installed a cruise control on a Toyota Corolla and the gizmo had some mpg readout functions in addition to controlling speed.
In the course of the conversation, I told Wayne that an even older car I owned had what may be the earliest, crudest form of mpg monitoring: the windshield wipers. I sensed from Wayne's voice that he's probably many years my junior and he had no idea where I was going with this windshield wiper thing. As for Wayne, he probably thought he was dealing with some ancient dude exhibiting early Alzheimer's symptoms.
Anyway, back around 1974 or '75 (aka "in the day"), I owned an AMC Hornet powered by either a straight 6 or a slant 6, I can't quite remember. The windshield wipers on this car weren't electric, they were powered by a vacuum motor. The vacuum obviously came from the intake manifold.
You had to be somewhat careful in this car because the speed (and effectiveness) of the wipers depended on having a good, high vacuum. And if you remember driving cars with carburetors, you know that the manifold vacuum was in direct relation to whether the carburetor was wide open (throttle mashed down) or shut (idling or going downhill). If you were going up a long, steep hill in a rainstorm, you had a problem in this car because to get up the hill you had to really mash down the accelerator. This threw the carb wide open, dropped the manifold vacuum and made the wipers slow to an absolute crawl. But as soon as you topped the hill and headed down the other side, you'd naturally back totally off the accelerator, which raised the manifold vacuum and made the wipers whip back and forth like crazy.
It didn't take me long to figure out that when the wipers were at a crawl, my engine was sucking gas like crazy. So, it's fair to say that those wipers functioned very much the same as the ScanGauge and you could also argue that this was an early form of Heads Up Display, because the information was right there in front of the driver, easily monitored just by looking through the windshield as those wipers sped up and slowed down.
Of course, back around 1974 when I owned that car, I was paying maybe $0.35 a gallon for gas, so the only real reason to pay much attention to mpg was as a way to monitor whether your latest tune-up did any good. We also watched mpg as an indicator of when the next tune-up was due. As long as the engine started well, idled smooth and the mpg hadn't dropped, then there was little reason to do a tune-up. That was especially true on a car where you had to adjust the ignition points manually, but that's a story for another time.
I'm glad to be hear and I look forward to tapping into the collective wisdom.
I talked to Wayne a bit ago and told a story that he encouraged me to post to the forums. I was asking about the ScanGauge and mentioned that at least 20 years ago I installed a cruise control on a Toyota Corolla and the gizmo had some mpg readout functions in addition to controlling speed.
In the course of the conversation, I told Wayne that an even older car I owned had what may be the earliest, crudest form of mpg monitoring: the windshield wipers. I sensed from Wayne's voice that he's probably many years my junior and he had no idea where I was going with this windshield wiper thing. As for Wayne, he probably thought he was dealing with some ancient dude exhibiting early Alzheimer's symptoms.
Anyway, back around 1974 or '75 (aka "in the day"), I owned an AMC Hornet powered by either a straight 6 or a slant 6, I can't quite remember. The windshield wipers on this car weren't electric, they were powered by a vacuum motor. The vacuum obviously came from the intake manifold.
You had to be somewhat careful in this car because the speed (and effectiveness) of the wipers depended on having a good, high vacuum. And if you remember driving cars with carburetors, you know that the manifold vacuum was in direct relation to whether the carburetor was wide open (throttle mashed down) or shut (idling or going downhill). If you were going up a long, steep hill in a rainstorm, you had a problem in this car because to get up the hill you had to really mash down the accelerator. This threw the carb wide open, dropped the manifold vacuum and made the wipers slow to an absolute crawl. But as soon as you topped the hill and headed down the other side, you'd naturally back totally off the accelerator, which raised the manifold vacuum and made the wipers whip back and forth like crazy.
It didn't take me long to figure out that when the wipers were at a crawl, my engine was sucking gas like crazy. So, it's fair to say that those wipers functioned very much the same as the ScanGauge and you could also argue that this was an early form of Heads Up Display, because the information was right there in front of the driver, easily monitored just by looking through the windshield as those wipers sped up and slowed down.
Of course, back around 1974 when I owned that car, I was paying maybe $0.35 a gallon for gas, so the only real reason to pay much attention to mpg was as a way to monitor whether your latest tune-up did any good. We also watched mpg as an indicator of when the next tune-up was due. As long as the engine started well, idled smooth and the mpg hadn't dropped, then there was little reason to do a tune-up. That was especially true on a car where you had to adjust the ignition points manually, but that's a story for another time.
I'm glad to be hear and I look forward to tapping into the collective wisdom.