There’s one calculator for trips and another one that tells you whether or not it’s worth taking a trip across town to save some money on gas.  There’s one that tells you at a glance, while you’re driving, what your gas mileage is.  There’s another that takes what your mileage used to be and converts it to what the EPA rating is today.

Then there’s GasDandy.  It’s the one that calculates and graphs your gas mileage performance over time.  Anyone who’s ever been on a diet will easily be able to understand how helpful that sort of trend information is.

GasDandy comes in a personal version that allows you to track mileage (and other items) on up to three vehicles.  A fleet version that will keep track of the performance of each of your small company’s vehicles is also available. Both will help you manage your gas usage and much more.  GasDandy will use the numbers you put in to calculate and remind you when important maintenance, like oil changes and tire rotations are due.  It will also help you spot changes in your car’s performance that may indicate serious problems ahead.

It is a compact and easy to use desktop application that could become one of your favorite household utilities because it isn’t just some spreadsheet of numbers.  Here’s how it works.

All you do is record your odometer reading and gas purchases and GasDandy takes care of the rest.  I’m one of those who was constantly forgetting to write my numbers down, or bring my little car memo book into the office each month to claim my business mileage, but I’ve found an easy way to take care of that too. Now, when I fill up, I send myself a txt message on my phone with my numbers.  Seeing that message pop up on the screen reminds me to record my numbers when I get home and I’m done.

Since I’ve been trying to incorporate some driving techniques to help me get better gas mileage, checking the colorful graphs I get from GasDandy has been fun. I can see what gas mileage I’m getting while I’m driving with a Scan Gauge II (since my car didn’t come with a mpg gauge like some new cars), but it’s GasDandy that really tells me how much of an impact that’s having on my wallet.

So far it looks like I’m on track to save more than $500 on gas this year.  That makes GasDandy’s $19.95 purchase cost one of the best bargains I’ve come across in years.  You can:

Purchase and download the personal version here (for only $19.95)

Purchase and download the fleet version here (for only $99.95).

For anyone who might still be fence sitting, both versions come with a 60 day, 100%, no questions asked refund guarantee.

I look forward to hearing how it’s helping you save money on gas and car maintenance.

Price pressure at the pump had many more Americans enjoying “staycations” than ever before. In fact, early in the summer, official reports showed travel actually down by nationwide for the first time in over six years. The AAA motor club reports that they expect the trend to continue over the upcoming Labor Day weekend.  They forecast nearly 0.9 % fewer trips of 50 miles or more will be taken. That would be the sharpest decline in nearly eight years.

However, the travel drought in America may ease a bit. It may be possible since most parts of the country have enjoyed a minor but persistent drop in gasoline prices over the past three weeks. For many of us, it may indeed be time to hop in the car and take in that last summer festival, or trip to the lake that your family needs.

There are three different online calculators that can help you determine just how much you may need to pay in fuel to take that trip. Armed with the information from any one of them (or all three) ahead of time, you can relax and enjoy the bright blue skies and open road.

BUT WAIT! Before you rush off to input your trip plans, there are a couple of caveats we need to pass along. All three of them, as you will see, will give you slightly different data. None of them alone is likely to answer your question as accurately as you would like as a result. So take their numbers with a pinch of salt and plug them in to your own ongoing gas mileage calculator at home and keep an eye on your in-car calculator to make the adjustments you need for personal accuracy.

The first site online gas mileage calculator we’d like to recommend lives at the AAA site;
http://www.fuelcostcalculator.com Using this calculator is easy enough. You simply input your starting and ending cities along with your make, model and year of manufacture for your car and they’ll tell you what you can expect to spend…sort of. Drawbacks here include the fact that you can only choose major cities as beginning and end destinations. Also, you can’t enter a car’s true age over 10 years.

Las weekend I drove my eldest daughter back to school in Columbia, MO. We live a little north of Rockford, IL and I drove a very old 1995 Toyota Camry (I love it still). I was forced to use Chicago, IL as my closest large city starting point and St Louis, MO as the end point. Unfortunately, that difference meant my trip figures fell short of reality by nearly 95 miles.

I noticed while planning my route on my favorite map site, www.mapquest.com that they now have a button on the top for “gas prices.” It showed a may of my area with a couple of local prices called out for me. As handy as that was, I liked the “gas calculator” link underneath it even more. It popped up a little window that let me input the number of miles in my trip (that I got from their driving directions) and a price per gallon. From that it gave me a total I could expect to spend. Of course, I had done all the work, finding the miles and entering the prices. Also, I wasn’t able to include my car’s mileage figures (which I know are above average).

The third trip calculator aide that’s out there is a site you may already be familiar with. It’s called www.GasBuddy.com and it will let you input the city you plan to visit and find out what the price of gasoline or diesel is there. That’s the other part of the equation I needed for near accuracy on the Mapquest calculator.

Hopefully this combination of tools will help you determine that one final summer road trip is indeed within the budget. We all deserve a little break before the prices begin to climb again, as they are expected to do as the year ends.

When you bought your car you may recall learning that your car should get XYZ miles per gallon (mpg). Off you drove, secure in the knowledge that since you were getting XYZ miles per gallon and you had a 14 gallon tank (the average size now), you would need to fill up every ABC miles and it should cost you DEF.

Oh for the days of DEF! Or even for the days of just driving ABC miles. The average American now faces a 29 mile round trip commute to work. In addition to living further away from where we worked 50 years ago, we also live further away from the grocery store, our children’s playmates, and where we go to relax and unwind after work.

Until the end of 2007, we could at least take heart in the fact that the XYZ miles per gallon part of our calculation remained the same. All that changed in January, 2008.

That’s when the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) new gas mileage calculators went into affect. It’s the first time the numbers have changed in more than 20 years.

Over those twenty years minor fluctuations in values evened out and the EPA was left with solid evidence that led them to include and weight certain factors in their formulas differently than the original numbers.

Three factors in particular made a big impact on the changed numbers. The effects of colder outside temperatures in the winter and running your air conditioner to create colder inside temperatures in the summer were added to gas mileage calculators for the first time. Faster accelerations and faster driving speeds overall than had previously been calculated were also added to the calculations.

These are not the only factors that go in to the EPA ratings. That’s why the EPA continues to remind everyone that “your mileage may vary.” In fact, some of the other criteria they look at could

How and where you drive and the overall condition of your vehicle are also key. Fuel variations, vehicle variations, and age of your vehicle are also important. For example, that “sports car package” of options you purchased that put that great looking spoiler on your trunk could also be spoiling your mpg rating compared to cars that are otherwise identical but don’t have the spoiler.

Convert old MPG estimates to new estimate

**You must have javascript enabled in your browser as this will open a small window that includes the calculator.

Calculating this difference is just the first step in determining what your gas mileage rating really is. It will give you a ballpark figure of what you can expect only. To get the more accurate reading of your mileage that you need to visit:

Two Methods to Calculate Your Gas Mileage

Every gas mileage calculator method we know of relies on you making good notes about your main or trip odometer readings, etc.  But few of us are dedicated enough to actually remember to write them down every single time we get in the car.  And of course, the days we miss are the days we wind up needing that info for either business or tax reiumbursement of our miles.  This video shows you a great way you can go back and reconstruct your info:

Use Google Maps to calculate your biz or charity miles, even weeks or months after the trip. Use some great new capabilities of Google Maps to get accurate mileage of all your trips.

Duration : 0:7:12

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This is not a long term predictor of your gas mileage however. That’s a different calculation that will use this one. There are four steps to the first method and three steps to the second. All they take is paper, pencil and remembering to record the numbers right when you fill up. Both of these methods come from the US government’s information guide and site at www.fueleconomy.gov

Method one is the main Odometer method:

Step 1. Fill your tank completely and write down your vehicle’s odometer reading. Make sure you include all decimal places. Let’s say for example this reading is 42,000.5 miles.

Step 2. Drive until your normal refueling. Do not feel you need to wait until your car is all the way empty to refuel. (Most experts recommend refueling when your tank is ¼ full.) Write down the number of gallons it took to completely fill the tank and your vehicle’s new odometer reading. For our example let’s say your new odometer reading is 42,220.5 and you put 12 gallons of gas in your tank

Step 3. Calculate your driving distance by subtracting your old odometer reading from your new one. In our example this would leave us with 220 miles driven.

Step 4. Divide the number of miles driven by the number of gallons it took to fill up. 220 divided by 12 equals 18.33 miles per gallon (mpg).

The Alternative method for calculating your current mileage is to use your trip odometer.

Step 1. Fill your tank completely and reset your trip odometer to zero.

Step 2. When it’s time to refuel, fill the tank completely and write down the number of gallons it took to completely fill the tank. Also write down the mileage on the trip odometer before resetting it to zero. For our example, let’s say we drove 280 miles and it took 11.5 gallons to fill the tank

Step 3. Divide the miles driven by the number of gallons to fill the tank. 280 miles divided by 11.5 gallons equals 24.34 miles per gallon (mpg).

Remember, both these methods will tell you what your current gas mileage is, not what you can or even should always expect it to be. Several other factors will determine what your mileage is tomorrow, next month and six months from now. The weather will have an impact on your mileage, for example, with cold starts in the winter or running the air conditioning in your car in the summer changing your actual mileage readings.

For accurate and up to date mileage information at a glance, you can purchase a gas mileage calculator that will make these computations for you. You get an accurate and up to the minute readout similar to all your other dashboard readouts. It will allow you to know at a glance what’s going on with the systems in your car and help you improve your mileage and save money on gas.

If you’re ready to begin working on saving money on gas now, you can read more and get the all-in-one electronic guage we recommend here today.

In addition to helping you save money on gas, getting a handle on your baseline gas usage will help you spot potential maintenance problems in your vehicle before they get to be big problems. A sudden drop in gas mileage is a leading indicator of several problems that can cost you hundreds of dollars to repair. These problems will go undetected if you don’t know what your baseline gas mileage is.

But everyone knows that, right? You may think you know it – even roughly – off the top of your head. You may have when you bought your car, but not anymore. Everything you thought you knew about calculating your gas mileage is wrong. The MPG were recently redone based on new numbers and no one is getting the mileage they thought they were getting.

Beginning in 2008, the EPA changed its measurement standards. It’s the first time in 20 years they’ve adjusted their numbers, and there are a lot of surprises out there for us all as a result. Most vehicles will see their MPG ratings drop by 10% or so. But get this, the new hybrid vehicles are likely to drop by as much as 15% or so. That means that brand new Toyota Prius that the ad said would get you 55 combined city/highway actually nets you around 45 MPG

The caveat has always been “Your mileage will vary,” but after all these years the EPA is finally has enough data to begin pinning those numbers down a bit. New factors in the calculations include quick accelerations, driving in cold weather and driving with the air conditioning on. Other factors that can affect your miles per gallon significantly include how and where you drive and the condition of your vehicle.

You can read more about this at http://www.fueleconomy.gov./mpg/ That’s where you’ll also find a handy list of estimated MPGs by make and model. While looking at their charts may give you an overall feeling for current mpg norms, only your mileage figures count.

We explain the two methods you can use to calculate your current gas mileage by hand here.

We also recommend buying the Scan Guage II. It’s a completely automated device that constantly monitors your gas mileage to give you at a glance readouts. Of course, that reminds you to make those changes in your driving that will give you better gas mileage now, not when you think of it when you’re back home.

Either way, measuring your mileage results is perhaps the most important step you can take to beginning to manage and improve your gas mileage. With a firm baseline in hand, it will also be easier for you to spot variations that could be trying to alert you to maintenance problems before they become serious.