Fuel economy and weather

[qwikredline]

So today I made a mini road trip.



Blackstock to Sudbury, its 820 km return, 7.4 litres /100 km, I left at 8. 30 back at 4.45. Met Chris (C_D_88 etc) and gave him his parts, got my front weather tech cobalt floor mats (darren gave them to me for picking up the parts) and they fit a cavvy wntr btr just fine...

The weather was challenging, serious snow around Moonstone and Parry Sound, but eco cavvy ate them up and spit them out, thanks to demon arctic claw cooper el cheepo snew tires...one spin out in front of me ( saturn 1.9 , I think he was texting or something, drifted into shoulder, hooked snow, over corrected, big pendulum didnt get on it, didtn lock em up, backed into guardrail. I lolld. simply stopped and watched, then left before I got run over....


Point is, going up the snow squalls were pretty intense and on the four lane divided highway and later on the two lane undivided, I was in 4th and sometime 3rd. The only way on the two lane you knew you were not on your side of the road, was when I ran over the pavement growler grooves on the center line.

Point is, I was flogging the wntr btr pretty hard, so shocked when I got that sort of mileage. (Ya you Americano's can do the mpg figuring yourself, I fail at math so metric is good for me)

Gee I just lost a thousand word euridite edit! argh. repeat.

]



anyway the wntr btr has over 250,000 km and is bone stock. It runs pretty good and the grip is helped by being naturally aspirated. I was thinking about Steddy and the rest of you forced zealots, and figure that in these rough snow conditions, where the only way you know you are not in your lane is when your tires make noise on the center line growler grooves, you would be pretty much fckd in your 400 whp rockets.

The getrag (F23 to you ) is an interesting transmission as well, shifts terrible cable and shifter box wise compared to a delta, but the synchro's and the actual mechanical operation of the box is a bit whiny but rock solid, in fact compares well or better than a FSGMPT gear box (F35 to you)

I am banging on about 2500 km a month on the btr, one of the benefits of rural living, even the gym is a 40 km round trip.
I fixed the condensation build up in the rocker cover and dipstick by putting on a new oil cap ( its a vented type, unlike lsj and lnf eco motors.
So 7.4 litres/100 km.

whats urs? lol

[whitnith]

7.4 litres/100 km is 31.8 miles/gallon. Yes, I was bored.

My Cavi is so cray cray with gas that I don't even care what is gets. The gas gauge will go from half to empty to full to just sweeping randomly while driving. So I'm filling up so much because I rarely know how much gas is actually in it.

Tonight while driving the Cobalt told me it was doing 30 miles/gallon in the city... Which isn't true, but I'll actually figure it up next time I fill up since I filled up tonight. See how it changed with the new exhaust on it. Normal puttering around the city I'm rarely if ever hitting boost, so it could be pretty good.

[qwikredline]

Good one W. Bored by the post or the math? lol

the front end of the cavvy needs some trick joints it likes to nibble at the snow and clunks on reverse J turns, and its crying to me to make it a rear bar (the twisting beam config is different to delta and needs a different bend) but other than that, it surely rocks for the job...I wonder what I can get hypermiling it rather than flogging it? The effect of deep snow on fuel mileage should be devasting, with the drag and running one gear lower at 80-100 km/hr, but then it wasnt so on nice roads, could I get 40 mpg? I bet i can...

[B.rad]

Service your engine, John. :P


I've been getting 15.7 city/hwy mixed. I definitely see a difference with this winter gas. I usually get anywhere between 17.9-22mpg any other time of the year.

[slowswap]

5.0l F150 in 4wd was getting 22 mpg doing 60 mph.

[qwikredline]

Service your engine, John. :P


I've been getting 15.7 city/hwy mixed. I definitely see a difference with this winter gas. I usually get anywhere between 17.9-22mpg any other time of the year.

lol. I pulled the DRL relay as I am running HID in stock lites, but it sets the lite. I have not bitten the bullet to install projectors, but the DRL deal is a real pita with this car as the headlights are the DRL.. No solutions as yet,and none forthcoming without spending a lot of bux. This is a $3k car .

Kweens Denali gets 16 litres/100 km. sucks the gas big time. I bet a cruze cant match my mileage running hard in bad weather snow conditions....

Oh and the advantage Delco rotors and pads are kick ass in all conditions. I turned in the el cheepo crap new rotors and got a refund after one day they were warped at the get go. Delco ceramic advantage pads are made by Raybestos, who made our race pads for F cars back in the day, and they really cant be beat for most street/aggressive street use...

[loki141]

Looks like you had a fun drive. My silverado is getting 15.6L/100k.. About 70/30 hwy/city

[Domin8]

John, what do you think about Wagner Thermoquiet brake pads. Rumor has it they can't be beat?

As for mpg, made a trip to Elmira, NY from Chesapeake, VA and back in October and was easily seeing over 20mpg. My every day average is 15.4 with about 50/50 city/highway. When I go to Chicago, towing the LE5, I'll have to reset the mpg and see what I get. Since we are planning on driving to Utah right after our move I'll reset the mpg and see what the hoe is really doing. Truck was loaded with gear for my sisters wedding and 4 passengers plus luggage. The following weekend I pretty much did the same thing, sans wedding crap, to Pittsburgh for a football game. Same deal on the mpg. As for the Cobalts, LE5 and LSJ, both loaded, and weighed empty and full, for a 2,200 mile trip in the snow. This was January and February 2009. I drove both cars and took the same exact route. LE5 with a manual trans, according to the DIC was 31.8. I don't remember the weight of the LE5 loaded, but I do for the LSJ. It weighed ~2900 lbs empty and 3600 lbs full. Loaded was 300 lbs more than the LE5 loaded. The LSJ, stock tune, stock injectors, stock pulley, was 33.6/33.7. The snow experienced in the LE5 was a white out in Wyoming where I-80 was closed between Laramie and Cheyenne. The next day the snow was so strong that I couldn't see more than a few feet in front of me and I was pretty much driving by looking at the metal reflective posts on the left side of the freeway for a few hundred miles. About half way into Nebraska I was pretty much in the clear. In the LSJ I hit the same storm in West Virginia on I-64. There was no evidence of plows, so thank God for G85. Once I was headed downhill traction wasn't an issue even though it was about 2-3 inches of fresh powder on the Interstate while cruising at 60-65mph. Only time I stopped was for twizzlers and soda. The day I traded the LSJ I was seeing
40mpg highway with a 2.8 pulley, 60# injectors, BennyHHR tune, GM 2pass, and OTTP 3

[qwikredline]

Looks like you had a fun drive. My silverado is getting 15.6L/100k.. About 70/30 hwy/city

ya i cut across coming back on 169 to 11 and then 169 again to 12. going up i took 12 then backtracked on 11 to 400 the snow was so bad, and brutal as I said up at mt st louis moonstone....the 18 wheelers would cut the snow good on the unplowed fastlane for a while, but even for them it got to be too much and they fell back into line...

[qwikredline]

John, what do you think about Wagner Thermoquiet brake pads. Rumor has it they can't be beat?

As for mpg, made a trip to Elmira, NY from Chesapeake, VA and back in October and was easily seeing over 20mpg. My every day average is 15.4 with about 50/50 city/highway. When I go to Chicago, towing the LE5, I'll have to reset the mpg and see what I get. Since we are planning on driving to Utah right after our move I'll reset the mpg and see what the hoe is really doing. Truck was loaded with gear for my sisters wedding and 4 passengers plus luggage. The following weekend I pretty much did the same thing, sans wedding crap, to Pittsburgh for a football game. Same deal on the mpg. As for the Cobalts, LE5 and LSJ, both loaded, and weighed empty and full, for a 2,200 mile trip in the snow. This was January and February 2009. I drove both cars and took the same exact route. LE5 with a manual trans, according to the DIC was 31.8. I don't remember the weight of the LE5 loaded, but I do for the LSJ. It weighed ~2900 lbs empty and 3600 lbs full. Loaded was 300 lbs more than the LE5 loaded. The LSJ, stock tune, stock injectors, stock pulley, was 33.6/33.7. The snow experienced in the LE5 was a white out in Wyoming where I-80 was closed between Laramie and Cheyenne. The next day the snow was so strong that I couldn't see more than a few feet in front of me and I was pretty much driving by looking at the metal reflective posts on the left side of the freeway for a few hundred miles. About half way into Nebraska I was pretty much in the clear. In the LSJ I hit the same storm in West Virginia on I-64. There was no evidence of plows, so thank God for G85. Once I was headed downhill traction wasn't an issue even though it was about 2-3 inches of fresh powder on the Interstate while cruising at 60-65mph. Only time I stopped was for twizzlers and soda. The day I traded the LSJ I was seeing
40mpg highway with a 2.8 pulley, 60# injectors, BennyHHR tune, GM 2pass, and OTTP 3

havent tried wagner pads.

any ls motor really cant get mileage, unless with DOD and then its hard for them to do better than 14 l/100 km towing and head winds and side drag with an enclosed trailer kills mileage..
I have seen 40 mpg in summer in my Redline no problem, with 48* of timing the way it is on an LSJ and lean as fck at constant speed. But this is winter and the deep snow conditions up here are pretty deep...I think non lsd is an advantage at highway speeds dogging it, makes the car easier to drive with less overall potential traction. The trouble with torque biased diffs is you dont want the power to go more to the wheel with traction, (which is in snow and pulling you into the ditch as good as it can), while the highway side wheel is on ice....bad karma

the way i drive i exploit whatever i can get for traction, which means sometimes I will hook an inside snow bank to pull the car in on a curve at high speed with low traction, and other times I will stay out of slush and look for 18 wheeler tracks to follow and then jump the car over the lane seperation berm of snow to the cleared lane. Other times, I will run the tires on the shoulder if there is little snow and lots of ice to get more grip especially on black ice.
and the wntr btr has no abs, which means i cant reference what traction is there easily with braking like i can with abs. instead i use wheel spin levels to figure it out...

[jb09ss]

I was getting about 10l/100km in the winter with the lnf. Winter beater (pontiac vibe) with almost 1/3 the hp gets 9l/100km, weee.... But the ss has more grip than the vibe, at least it spins both wheels (lsd). Cavys are actually awesome in the snow, my sister had one and the thing was a tank.

[Domin8]

John, I'll be the first to admit that I have no idea what the timing was on the BennyHHR tune, but I do know it wasn't running lean. AFRs were definitely commanding 14.7. The difference here might very well be the injectors. What size are you running?

As for the traction in the snow with the LSJ. I fully understand what you're saying. As you know, I use to live in Salt Lake City, Utah. I, however, worked in Park City, Utah. I worked for the Public Works Department. That meant lots of early mornings. When my wife was on Rhode Island I used her car to get up the canyon on snowy days. My decision on that was based on my belief that the bigger sidewalls of the tires allowed for deeper tread, thus more traction. There was one day where I got into a big storm coming from work in the LSJ. That drive was miserable. What normally took 30 minutes became 2 1/2 hours. The only way I had traction was to walk the tightrope of stalling the car by keeping rpms around 500. By the end of the drive my right leg was a little tired.

Sent from my myTouch_4G_Slide using Tapatalk

[qwikredline]

JB09SS is right, cavvys are a tank, and he should know winters up in Quebec City are brutal where he lives, but in the late 1960's when I ice raced up there every winter, minus 40 deg was commonplace and I stuck my race car in underground parking so it would start in the am.
Gotta dig up the photos of me and Princess Grace in Quebec BITD on the winners podium. She was hot and I was not.

LSJ I see 48 degrees of cruise timing on my plx obd2 gauge...
tires generally have 11/32 of tread depth, 7 to 5 /32 on performance or shaved tires, regardless of tread depth. I ran a narrow tire, redonkulous, like 155/85/15 to increase contact patch pressure . And no shock damping..at all I drilled a hole and let all the fluid out.I could lift the inside front wheel on a 320i in a corner racing rubber to ice, no studs. Hakkepilita's were my fave, but Gislaveds are well rated, and Continental are coming on these days. Some snow tires have multi cellular compounds like Blizzak but they wear out after a few thousand miles and just become ordinary. I used to tractionize my tires, that was the big thing it was invented in New England in the 1900's (?!) a couple of rollers with spikes like a player piano roll, so jack car up lower the drive wheel tire combo onto the rollers and spine for a mile or two. If an LSD car both wheels up lol. Perforated the tread, awesome for traction and cheap.

Ipaid 68 bux for my Arctic Claw tires from Cooper speaking of cheap so not complaining at all for the price....

[rallycobalt06]

in my 00 Civic sedan i'm getting 31mpg..... 1.6L of fury!! poor thing has trouble getting out of it's own way.

[B.rad]

You need TEH DOHC VTAAAKKK.

[rallycobalt06]

You need TEH DOHC VTAAAKKK.

supposedly it's the 1.6L SOHC VTEC........ whatever!

[ThePaul]

summer I avg @32.4mpg
fall and spring @28-29
below 40f 26.8-27.3
my car needs some tlc quite badly though. 70k miles on pretty much everything but the oil in it lol.

[USMCFieldMP]

My Volkswagen VR6 (2.8L Inline V6) gets 18-20mpg City and 24-27mpg Highway, depending on the temperature outside. When it gets cold, coolant temps drop and the MPG suffer heavily. So what I usually end up doing, is covering up about 3/4 of the radiator with a sheet of cardboard. That keeps the Coolant temps right between 194-212*F. Hotter block = Better MPG.

Cobalt presently gets Infinite MPG. Before she went down, I was managing 18-25mpg in the City, and 35-42mpg Highway, depending on speed and fun pedal play.

[qwikredline]

summer I avg @32.4mpg
fall and spring @28-29
below 40f 26.8-27.3
my car needs some tlc quite badly though. 70k miles on pretty much everything but the oil in it lol.

good motor is good lol

[G Speed]

It runs pretty good and the grip is helped by being naturally aspirated. I was thinking about Steddy and the rest of you forced zealots, and figure that in these rough snow conditions, where the only way you know you are not in your lane is when your tires make noise on the center line growler grooves, you would be pretty much fckd in your 400 whp rockets.

The getrag (F23 to you ) is an interesting transmission as well, shifts terrible cable and shifter box wise compared to a delta, but the synchro's and the actual mechanical operation of the box is a bit whiny but rock solid, in fact compares well or better than a FSGMPT gear box (F35 to you)

I am banging on about 2500 km a month on the btr, one of the benefits of rural living, even the gym is a 40 km round trip.
I fixed the condensation build up in the rocker cover and dipstick by putting on a new oil cap ( its a vented type, unlike lsj and lnf eco motors.
So 7.4 litres/100 km.

whats urs? lol

Winter driving does suck ass..... I'm on 17" with 205/50 or 55 lol.... with winter tires.... no performance winters lol.... traction in dry and wet = is none.... 320ftlb/tq coming on all of a sudden with 205's + fwd = torque steer/spining hell stock they came 12/32.. probably at 11 after two winters.. wear is great hankook i-pike... would recommend

mileage... meh.... 9L/100 average... driving like an ass... summer I average 8L once again driving like an ass....at the track 12-14L <- still amazing