A dirty engine air filter will have no effect on fuel efficiency. The fuel injection meters the fuel according to how much air enters. And the throttle plate acts as one big plug. Worst case is at wide open throttle you will have some decrease in power if the filter is blocked to the point of distortion.

 

My mileage was also quite poor when I bought my 2010 Sport, brand new. I was high teens for the first week, but gradually moved up to high 20's. I've never broken 30. These are all city mileage, in a city full of traffic lights. My highway mileage is usually over 40. I've gotten as high as 49. Note, all of these numbers use imperial (Canadian!) gallons. US government rates the fit at about 32 imperial MPG.

Don't worry, OP, it gets better.

 

Bravo. I am glad someone understands the effect of restricted air filter. It's amazing how much misinformation floats around the internet (including on sites that give automotive advice) where they claim the mileage or reliability will be affected by a restricted air filter.

 

to 2010FitInSK:

Thanks for the encouraging words!

But as the season has grown steadily colder and that winter snow has started to accumulate (with the correspondingly crawling traffic: hour and a half to drive 7 or 8 miles today!), 11.7L/100 km (24 mpg imperial, 19 mpg US) is our current running average.

And that's with my granny wife driving!

So I hope you're right that it'll eventually get better...

 

OK- since our latest fill-up on Saturday, we've been averaging 10.2L/100km (27.7 mpg imperial) or ~23 mpg US, which is definitely a slight improvement!

Keeping my fingers crossed it gets even better...

 

Where are you located? You have to stop driving uphill all the time.

I think if you keep track of how many liters you put in over say 5 fill ups and work out your mileage then then you will find you will be around 8l/100km.

 

Flat-as-a-pancake prairies; no hills!

But very short commutes (5-7 miles, rush-hour traffic, -15C) and less than 300 miles on the odometer. But I' m just happy it's going in the right direction.

I hear you about averaging the fill ups, and will be doing exactly that over the next couple months. It's a positive trend though, and that makes me a lot happier with this little car!

 

LMAO. You are worried about nothing. The car was likely moved short distances and left idling a lot before you got it. You will get 7.8 once you calm down and ignore that dash for a few tanks. Just reset the trip mileage when you next fill up and then check ad the next fill up.

Those Prairie mountains are a bitch eh?

bill

 

Conversation really should have ended here. Short commute, spent sitting at lights in traffic.

You are getting 0mpg (an instantaneous measure) every second you are at a red-light. You consume much more fuel every time you accelerate vs steady state cruising.

It takes time for the engine coolant to warm up and fueling is pegged to coolant temperature, and till it reaches a certain temperature the engine is operating in "open loop."

As long as it takes for the coolant to get to operating temperature, it takes several times longer for the oil to warm up and thin out. This greatly increases pumping losses.

To top it off you are driving an Auto trans, which wastes even more energy in traffic from internal friction and the fluid converter. This fluid also takes time to warm up.

You would be a good candidate for a hybrid that can run in electric-only mode for brief periods with your commute as described, if fuel economy is your biggest single concern.

 

Well, I'm sure that you're right; car was one of the last 2013s on the lot, so may well have been shunted around quite a bit in its tenure there (it had about 16 km on the clock when we picked it up).

Sorry if I came across as agitated; I'm actually usually pretty calm.

Don't get me wrong: this little car car feels robust and agile, and great fuel-economy would just be the icing on the cake. I guess I just wanted it all. :-)

Laffing @ "prairie mountains"

 

Agreed on most of the above points, except:

1. Conversations aren't always quite *that* cut and dried :-)

2. I wouldn't characterize fuel economy as my BIGGEST concern with this vehicle; I was/am much more interested in reliability, fun-for-the-dollar, interior space efficiency, style. It's just that everyone else here was quoting such high numbers, I was somewhat concerned mine might reflect something wrong with the car (I just don't trust dealerships).

3. I'm going to be on a fixed income in a few weeks, so a costly hybrid would have been out of the question, although the better the mileage, the better off I'd be...

I appreciate all the feedback; it's helped put things in perspective. I still wonder though if, for instance, the PDI was done right, because of the rotten-egg/rich-gasoline smell I sometimes get from the catalytic converter as well as the mediocre gas mileage.

 

I've tracked the gas mileage from the beginning on my 2011 Sport AT and you can vary the MPG in a lot of ways: heavy foot, seasonal gasoline blends, city / highway, 60 mph / 70-75 mph, and even running the air conditioner. Also what you see on the dash is what you always get at the pump.


In the end, I average 32 MPG and 32-33 MPG is the most frequent result of a fill-up at the pump (Southcentral Pennsylvania).

 

In my cold short commutes I'm at 18 mpg on my last tank! Sure is a long way away from 33 city. I'm doing 2 more fill ups and calling Honda Canada.

 

To tell them what? You can't expect 30mpg EVER if all you do are short cold commutes in ANY car.

 

you shouldn't be worried about mpg if you have a short commute anyway.

Even if you only get 15mpg, if you're doing only 15miles per day, it isn't going to add up.
When you eventually end up going on a long trip, like an 800 miles road trip, the MPG from those long trips will overshadow all those 15mpg/15mile days and contribute a lot more to the average.


If you're only doing 15miles/day, then fuel shouldn't be your worry. If you break it down, the sunk costs of registration and insurance will start accounting for a bigger part of the cost/mile.

If you go shopping at the store, and you intend to buy a bottle of water and a steak, and eggs, and cereal, and other things, and the bottle of water should cost $1, and the rest of your groceries are $100.
Even if the bottle of water costs $2, 200% more of what you expected, it isn't affecting your total that much.

 

Oh 7.5 mile commute? The car's probably in open loop for 5 of those 7 miles

 

You're bigger worry than mileage with such short cold commutes, is wear and tear. The power train parts will wear out a lot faster and/or fail than if you did a high mileage commute on a regular basis. Seems counter intuitive, but it's true for many reasons I can't even bother to get into. Research and see.

 

In the "olde days", muffler systems were pretty bad and routinely rusted and wouldn't pass the state vehicle safety inspections. Something about carbon monoxide poisoning. But I was driving 6 miles each way to work and the system would never get hot enough to flash off all of the water and sulfur dioxide (325+ deg F), which then made the acid and it ate muffler systems. OEM and aftermarket all died an early death.


Longer commute with some slow country roads at first before the highway is probably the best.