Manage Your Fuel Consumption
Everyone I know who owns a car is cursing about the increasing fuel costs. I'm in the lucky position that I do not own a car and that I do not have plans to own one in the near future. With rising fuel costs come incentives to manage and calculate the monthly fuel consumption of a car to find out how expensive that car really is.
The figures that are collected could then be analyzed and fuel consumption could probably be reduced by driving less or even switching to a car that does not need as much fuel as the old car on average.
The software CarbuCheck can manage the fuel consumption for several users. It's a basic software that comes with everything needed. It obviously does not connect to the gas tank in a car which means that it is up to the driver to keep track of the distances and tank stops.
The user can input the start and arrival kilometers, the fuel quantity and the money paid for it. The mandatory fields that have to be entered are the fuel quantity and either the money paid for it or the distance.
The application has some shortcomings though especially a notorious overflow bug that rendered my test profile that I created useless. This could be because I decided to keep the newer versions of at least one file that came with the software. This is asked during installation.
If this software is not working for you you can try the following alternatives:
- DriveArchive Fuel Consumption Calculator - basic calculator that does not remember previous entries and can thus only be used to calculate the current costs.
- Gas Price Calculator - provides a simple calculator that compares the price of filling the tin at different gas stations for you taking the distance to each gas station into consideration
There is a surprising lack of up to date applications in this niche. Do you know of a better software to keep track of the car's fuel consumption ? Let me know.
Advertisement
I’m also loving FuelFrog these days!
1 US gallon = 3.78541178 liter
My car is a Nissan Altima 3.5SE automatic transmission and has a 6 cylinder engine with about 245 horsepower. Best gas mileage I ever got was 21mpg (all highway at 70-85 mph speed). Worst was about 13.5mpg around town. I do have a “heavy foot” on the accelerator.
My numbers are real. Don’t believe the government mileage estimates! They are hogwash in my experience. I still have the new car sheet that estimated gas mileage for this car at 28hwy/21city.
http://www.dnsoft.be/dn_software/dn_freeware/dn_info_freeware/Carbu/index.htm
Jojo what’s a gallon again in litres? That looks like a pretty high fuel consumption. What car are you driving ?
I wrote a little Excel spreadsheet long ago to track gas usage in my car (new in March 2002).
Current stats:
Total miles = 42410.0
Total gallons used: 2361.87
Total cost of gas: $5,795.57
Avg cost/gallon: 2.443
Avg miles/gallon: 17.45
My 1st fill-up (my car requires premium gas), I paid $1.679/gal in March 2002. My last (June 27, 2008), I paid $4.679/gal!