it's about 15mpg for my 01 stratus se.

i am wondering why it comes so low.

coz it supposes to be like 20mpg minimum.....but mine is just way too low...only 15mpg!!!

who can tell me what i shall do for my car to increase the life of the gas?!

thx a lot!!!

 

assuming that fluids are all good i'd start with plugs and an air filter. other things might be tires, fuel filter, o2 sensors, pcv valve, and the list goes on. do you have any codes?

 

Tire pressure has one of the greatest effect on mileage. Of course if you have aftermarket rubber (low profile tires on stock rims) you sacrifice mileage there as well.

Vince

 

has it been tuned up ever? how many miles?

my RT gets around 20, and thats ALL stopa nd go traffic now..when i was driving 30 miles to work each day, i was getting around 25...and going to the nationals last year, we got almost 30.

 

woh~~so many thing need to deal with!
ok...so wut's the ideal air pressure of the tires for great gas but not for soft drivin?

i did change the spark plug, tires(great product refered by my fd)....but the main thing is the fuel filter never got changed....coz i cannot find the spot of the filter......maybe i should drive to a shop and ask for changin.......

oh , yeah....air filter...i have changed it...but how often should i change the air filter? i'm newbie....xixi!!!

 

im not sure about the specific tire, but close to "max" is ideal for mileage...look in the fine print on the tire.

 

air filter good for a year unless you live in a dust bowl or nasty air. how hard do you drive? short drives stop/go EAT gas.

tire press: the harder the tire the less your motor has to work to get your car going, but a harder ride.

 

i'm a slow driver which mean i step on brake with a long distance to the stop line....and i launch the car very slow...
usually, i control it between 2000 to 2500 rev. but sometimes i have to make it 3500 to cut lane..haha!

ok...so wuts the max for the tire pressure? as long as it saves gas, i dun care if it's a hard ride.

thx, folks!!

 

OK, I just hammered this out, and reserve the right to pull and replace it with a cleaner or modified copy. I have not covered it as well as I had liked, and still need to talk about tire pyrometers, (which is a far more accurate guage than this method) but it is getting overly long and wordy. Still..... I needed to start somewhere, and it will help give you a start as well. When finalized maybe I can get BadStrat to make it a permanent sticky or somethin'.

Constructive criticism gladly accepted... Vince


NOTE: I am not a tire specialist, and the recommendations here are from my personal experience only. When in doubt, consult a true specialist you trust, as I will not be responsible for damages from following my examples.


Time and time again, I am reminded how much we take our tires for granted, with really very little understanding about how properly set your tire pressures.
Most of us simply read the sticker in the door jam, or perhaps glance at the tires sidewall, and fill it to something close to the recommended pressure. Good enough…. Right?
In truth, not by a long shot! Hidden behind those generic inflation recommendations is a set of tires yearning to be brought up to their true potential! You see, “recommended pressures” are always meant to be a general guideline, but not a law cast in stone. To get the most from your tires, you need to know how to read and tune them.
The process is really quite simple, once you understand the practice. What I will attempt to describe is a procedure that will help you adjust your tires for optimal performance with nothing more that white chalk (or white shoe polish), a pressure gauge, a portable compressor, and a parking lot!

First off, I want to make a couple assumptions before you go off and start messing with your tires (i.e. da fine print!).
• One is that you had a proper alignment, and all your suspension parts are in good shape.
• You typically drive more than a few blocks every day. (I mention the distance because it is important to realize that your tires operate at two temperatures, hot and cold. OK, theoretically, they can vary quite a bit more depending on outside temps and types of road surfaces, but for this lesson, lets just work with basics.)
• Next is that you have an interest in getting performance from your tires.



Understanding:
All tires are not created equal:
To begin with, we need to realize that all tires are different. In most cases, you have no idea if the set of 4 tires came from the same production batch, or if they sat around getting mixed on some warehouse floor for several years before your set got bundled and shipped to a tire store (where they got mixed again with existing shelf stock). New OEM tires are probably the exception here, as carmakers don’t let stock sit around, and have a delivery chain straight from the tire manufacturer to them.

Weight distribution:
All cars have a weight distribution rating, commonly referred to as “Front to Rear weight Ratio”. This is a ratio of how your car distributes its entire weight between the front and rear tires. An overly simplified example would be a follows: You have a 4000lb car, with a 60/40 (60 front/40rear) weight distribution. This tells us your front tires support 2400lbs, while the rear only carried 1600lbs of your cars weight. That’s a whopping 800lbs difference! The truly technical driver will also realize that your car also has a side-to-side ratio, although we tend to not give it as much attention as the more dramatic F/R figure.

Armed with the above points, you can probably see that using the same generic tire pressure all around is not utilizing your tires to their best ability. We could get picky and try to set pressures for each of them, but for practical purposes, learning the pressures for front and rear will be what I recommend.

Lets get started:
Tuning the tire is really simple if you have a good alignment, as we are simply looking for tread wear. Over inflated, and we loose adhesion and prematurely wear the center tread down. Under inflated and we flex our sidewalls too much, and cause the tires to scrub off the outer tread. We all know to look for these obvious wear patterns, however these take time to manifest themselves to the point we can see and act on them. Instead, we overlook a much simpler, and often more accurate method….. tire “rollover”.
Tire rollover is the deliberate distortion of the tread as your car turns into a corner. As you turn hard, the outside tire is pulled inward at the bottom, and the tire will try to roll over onto the sidewall. Now, driving on your sidewall is never a good thing, but your tire was indeed designed for rolling over on its outer edge to maximize corning.

Our object is to let the tire roll the proper amount. With over inflated tires, your sidewalls remain stiff, and resist this rollover. With under inflated tires, you actually exceed the safe rollover points and ride on the sidewall itself.
So, how do we know what is “too little” and what is “too far”? Simple! Most tire makers provide a rollover mark right on the side of your tire! Look for a little arrow (actually a triangle) on your sidewall up near the main tread. These triangles are often stamped in quarter quadrants about your tires circumference. The tip of this triangle is the “rollover limit” of your tires design, and what we want to adjust pressure to meet.
Here is where the chalk and parking lot come into play. First, this task should be done with your tires warm, not cold, so drive around a bit first. Next, chalk (I prefer white liquid shoe polish, as it is easier to see) each tire from the top of the tread, down past the rollover mark. (Do this at several quadrants to allow for a more accurate reading)
Take your car for a spin! Drive about, do some hard turns about the parking lot, then stop and look over your white marks. You will see exactly how far your tire rolled over on its side (the white will be scrubbed off). This is what you want to adjust your tire pressure for. If the tire didn’t roll far enough, let out some pressure. If it rolled too far, increase the pressure. The trick is to get it to roll right to the tip of that little arrow(consider it a “do not exceed” mark). You may need to re-chalk and drive around a few times to get all the tires set. Once there, you will definitely notice a difference in handling, as well as the more accurate pressures for your tires.
After yer done, and you park your car for the night, be sure to go out when the tires are cold and jot down the front and rear “cold” pressure (which you will now find to be as much as 3psi different depending on the F/R ratio) for future reference. I even I keep the warm tire pressure handy as I’m usually on the road and stopping for gas when I bother to check them. Just remember if you are topping off your pressure in a hot tire, that you are filling it with cold air, which will expand further as you drive. This may over inflate you by a PSI or two!

Vince

 

cool info. i've never heard of the roll marks (but i'll look now). instead used tread temp. i try to keep it even across the contact patch for longer wear. thanks for the info.