It's been a long time since I've done a roadtrip writeup for Autocrossing.com, so I figure I'm about due for a new one. For this one, it all started with a messageboard thread that I saw on GreenHybrid.com. I read that board mainly on account of the fact that I have a passion for efficiency and there's something very technical and geeky about cars that get extremely good gas mileage. While my 97 Civic HX isn't a hybrid, it was pretty technologically advanced at the time, and was the most fuel efficient Civic you could buy back then, rated at 37/44mpg. What it lacked however was any sort of guage to show what your current fuel economy was, so you just had to drive however you felt was efficiently and calculate your mileage with each fillup.
That all changed of course when I came upon the before mentioned thread, which is about a little
high tech box called the ScanGauge which is a recently released
product that plugs into the OBD2 port of any 96+ car and shows you all sorts of cool stuff based on it
reading the information out of the car's ECU. You can visit the website for the product to learn more
about it. I've always wanted a way to monitor the vehicle sensors, but every other product for reading
OBD2 information either required a laptop or Palm device, or was $400. Since the ScanGauge required no
other hardware and is only $130, I decided I may as well buy one.
I wasted no time in playing around with it, checking out all the sensors it can display so I could
monitor exactly how quickly the car warms up, since the ScanGauge can tell you water temp - such as
showing that it's 76 degrees after sitting all night. The stock temp gauge doesn't even come off the
cold mark until about 130 degrees, and then stays put for anything from 170 to 210 or so. I never saw
any temps above 210 degrees, but most likely somewhere above that is about when the stock gauge would at
least think about moving. Still, for someone who's technically oriented and likes to know what's going
on with stuff, this is a pretty cool product to have. Since one of the functions is a trip recorder that
shows you your calculated gas mileage, I figured this would be a great way to produce a chart of what my
gas mileage is at various speeds. It was a little time consuming to find a suitable road for each of
the speed ranges, but it was still pretty fun. The other minor issue is that the Civic HX can go into
what's known a lean-burn mode, where the car actually runs a much leaner air/fuel mixture than is normal
- about 20 to 25:1 instead of the normal 14.7:1 or so. This apparently does not get correctly reported
to the ScanGauge, so the chart ended up being a bit pessimistic in the 40-65mph range and having a weird
flat spot as it transitions out of the speeds where lean burn is an option. Still, it's more data than
I had previously, and that's always a good thing. If you want to see the chart, here
it is.
So where's this all leading? Well, since I'd already read on the messageboard that the SG would
overestimate a bit for lean-burn mode, the only question left to answer would be how much. This calls for
a roadtrip! Where to? Well, strangely enough, after I discovered that Google is currently developing
a Java-based map service I started playing around with it looking
around the state for anything cool that I haven't seen already. I started panning west and noticed
Painted Rock State Park on the map, which is actually
officially named Painted Rocks Petroglyph Site. I'd never been there before, and since the weather
isn't going to stay cool for much more than another couple weeks, I figured that if I'm going to go
somewhere in the desert, I may as well go sooner rather than later. It's about 95 miles away or so,
which makes for a good roadtrip distance since I figured I'd take the minor roads and see what kind of
gas mileage I could coax out of my car if I drove it very conservatively.
So I started the trip by setting up both my GPS and the ScanGauge in my car and heading to the nearest gas
station to top off the gas tank. Once there, I reset the ScanGauge's odometer and trip info, the GPS's
odometer, and the car's gauge cluster odometer. Since I'm very confident in the GPS to report extremely
accurate figures with regards to distance, I figured it would be a good benchmark against which to see
how close the car's gauge cluster and the ECU reading for distance were to reality. With everything
set, I was off and running. Since I was going for max gas mileage, I was doing stuff like upshifting at
2200rpm or so in each gear, using 5th gear by the time I reached 35mph and working to coast as long as
possible each time I was approaching a red light. After about 6 miles or so of city streets I reached
the freeway, where I kept it to 65mph indicated, which is about 63mph actual according to the GPS.
I've had good success on my commute to work with that speed, so I think it may be right around the
peak speed at which the engine load is still light enough to use lean-burn for maximum fuel efficiency.
As long as you stay in the right lane, you don't get passed too much either, so at least I'm not holding
anyone up by driving the speed limit as opposed to 5-10 over.
After a few miles of freeway I hit the I-10 and cruised south for about 3 miles or so to get off at
the Maricopa road exit. Once on Maricopa road, it's 65mph with no stops for a good 20 miles or so to
the next turnoff. I settled in a hundred feet or so off the back of a motorhome doing 60mph or so.
I'm not sure if it was really close enough to get any sort of drafting effect since it was a pretty
considerable distance, but then again, they displace a ton of air that I'm sure doesn't just go back
to perfectly stationary as soon as they pass by. The instant MPG readout was only showing about 36mpg,
which seemed extremely low for such a slow speed, but I wasn't too worried since I already knew it was
going to be somewhat pessimistic anyway. At the least it would be fine for comparison to when I hit the
287 to cruise down to Gila Bend. Once I hit the town of Maricopa, that's about where the turnoff is for
the 287 which heads southwest towards Gila Bend. The limit is just 55mph and it's a two lane road with
real close to no weekend traffic at all. I kept it to about 55mph indicated for the whole 40 miles or
so and was passed by maybe 7 cars the whole way to Gila Bend.
Now this is where the story gets good. I reach Gila Bend and have my Rand Mcnally and google online map
printouts in hand that show I take "old US-80" north to Watermellon Drive, then take that out to some
road that goes to Sisson drive. Sisson then runs all the way to Painted Rock Road. By doing this,
I avoid having to hop on I-8, which is a 75mph road. Instead, I get to take the scenic route through
rural Gila Bend. The first couple pictures in this writeup are from the stretch along Watermellon.
It's actually pretty nice there. When I saw the 1200 acres for sale I had to stop and take a picture.
1200 acres is about two square miles. I can't even imagine owning two square miles of land, but there's
a sign up for it as if it's just a big housing lot or something. I never did call to ask how much it
costs, preferring to think to myself that maybe some day I'd be able to afford to buy myself a square
mile of land or something. Of course, about halfway down Sisson road the pavement ends. Nothing on
either map said anything about dirt roads! Oh well, it ended up not really mattering. If you click
on the picture from the dirt part of Sisson you'll see that it's huge, like 3 or 4 lanes wide probably
and was extremely well maintained. I was able to just cruise along at about 40mph for 5-6 miles until
finally hitting pavement again. I suppose no trip to Gila Bend is complete without having to get your
car dirty on a dirt road.
From there on out to the Painted Rocks site was pretty uneventful. It's kind of puzzling really how
a place with so much natural beauty with the mountains and rolling hills can be such a slummy place.
For those of you not familiar with Arizona, Gila Bend is often the butt of jokes for being kind of a
backwater town. I guess it's still true what they say about location though; in Arizona, Phoenix is
simply the place to be for business. Nevermind the fact that there's probably spots around Gila Bend that
have better views than million dollar houses in Tempe, the fact is that no one wants to live in Gila Bend
because there's nothing in Gila Bend. I'm thinking this stigma may have some effect on the Painted Rocks
site considering the rather low number of visitors for something that's listed as a state park and all.
They have a lot of RV parking separate from the visitor area though, and to be fair there were probably
6 or 7 trailers parked there. I guess if I had a motorhome and wanted to hang out in Arizona for a week
or two, it's a real nice location with all the mountains. Give it another month though and it will be
about 900 degrees and probably about deserted.
Speaking of deserted though, the parking lot certainly provided an abundance of room. Hey, at least I
didn't have to worry about maybe getting a door ding from some out of stater being careless parked next
to me. Still, it's a little creepy going to someplace that says it's a state park and you pull off the
paved road to a dirt road that leads to an empty parking lot. Hey, as long as my car still runs and
all my electronic toys are working fine, I didn't really care anyway. So on to the painted rocks!
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Well to be honest, I'm probably not ever destined to be a historian or archaeologist because I guess it's
just a little tough for me to get excited about drawings carved into rocks from a real long time ago.
I enjoy art and all, but this would probably have been a lot more interesting for someone who enjoys that
sort of thing more than I. On the upside, I did see a really huge lizard one a rock right next to me.
I never see lizards at my house, and even at my old one we just got the little ones that were a couple
inches long or so. This one had to be a good 10 inches from head to tail. He was kind enough to just
sit there as I took a number of pictures from slightly different angles to try to get in a position
where the lighting was acceptable. Having my Sigma 18-125mm lens was handy too because I could zoom
way in without having to get too physically close to it. I was able to get the shot and continue on
without him even moving from the rock he was perched on.
Well after a good 15 minutes or so of walking about the rock pile and doing my best to appreciate the
work that a bunch of people a thousand years ago put into it, I decided it was time to get my Yokohama
ES100 tires back on pavement again and head home. Somehow I doubt that the Yokohama engineers were
really sitting back at the lab discussing the tire's dirt handling abilities, but even with 42psi in
the tires they still managed to work pretty much how you'd expect any standard tire to on dirt roads.
In fact, I was satisfied enough with them that along the 287 headed home I spotted a sign on the side
of the road descriptively labeled "TRAIL". It was marking a dirt road that appeared to go off towards
a nice 2-300 foot high mountain, so I had some hopes that there was a trail that lead up the mountain
and decided to pull off pavement again to see what was down this dirt road labeled "TRAIL".
Well after about a mile or so of crawling along at 5-15mph on a road that was clearly designed to be
driven on by trucks, not cars, I finally hit a sign labeled "Butterfield Stage Route Trail". There was
another sign by it that gave a little history on the trail which apparently was a big deal road back
in the early to mid 1800's. No sign of anything designed for hiking however, just lots of signs for
various ATV trails and stuff saying that the whole area is state land or something and to stay on marked
trails only. So much for climbing up a mountain, but I suppose it's just as well since I wasn't really
carrying enough water to do a real hike anyway.
So with that being my final side trip and last time on dirt for the day I continued home at the posted speed limit for each road back, pretty much the same as how I drove out there. It felt like it was a pretty long time to be on the road considering it didn't seem like I really went that far from home. That might have had something to do with the fact that I felt a little let down by the fact that the feature attraction - something I actually paid my stupid $2 for a parking pass at - was basically a dirt path that did a circle around a pile of rocks with some line drawings scratched in them. Well one way or another, 4.5 hours after I filled up, I was back at the same gas station filling up my tank again. The car was a mess of dirt and bug splats, but it continued to do what it's done for the previous 131,000 miles and got me from point A to point B without giving me any trouble. When the fuel pump clicked off the display read 4.267 gallons to top off the tank.
Now the ScanGauge had shown that it thought the car used 5.0 gallons and gone 196 miles, showing that it calculated my fuel economy at 39.0mpg. The trip odometer in the dash showed 198.1 miles, and my GPS, which I consider to be the authority on the matter of distance covered read 200.71 miles. Now going based on the odometer in the dash, that still works out to a very impressive 46.4mpg, but since that apparnetly is underreporting mileage by about 1.3%, the true calculation would be the 200.7 miles, which works out to 47.0mpg, which coincidentally made for a new record for an out and back roadtrip in the whole time I've owned my Civic. Now that I at least had an idea of how much the SG was underreporting the fuel economy, I was able to program it to compensate for the variance and it should be a lot more accurate the next time I take it out for a road trip. All in all it was a pretty good day for photos, relaxed driving on lightly traveled roads, and data collecting while setting a new record for roadtrip fuel economy in my Civic.
