It is wonderful to have to fill up a 10 gallon gas tank just once a month, on 40 miles a day's worth of commute.
Hang on here. A forty mile daily commute x 5 times per week =200 miles per week or 866 miles per month (4.3 weeks in avg month)excluding weekend driving. That comes out to x 86.6 mpg avg (866 divided by 10). Is that correct?
Sorry about that. I was playing fast and loose with the math. The Insight has a 10.6 gallon fuel tank, and according to my odometer (which I zeroed at every fill up) I would generally get about 600-700 miles between fill-ups. I don't usually fill up until the warning light comes on, which is aound the one gallon point. Assuming that I probably drive it down to the .6 gallon point by the time I do refuel, I've burned 10 gallons of gas. So, my mileage works out to be about 65 MPG. Which is not too shabby. This, of course, implies that I did fill it up more than once a month, at least some of the time.
For the mathematically inclined: ((600 Mi + 700 Mi)/2)/(10.6 Gal - .6 Gal) = 65 Mi/Gal
I won't claim that that is a scientifically accurate study, as it is only based on my observations, and my driving.
This is actually better than average mileage for these machines. Of course, I did kind of turn it into a game. "How efficiently can I drive?" There are clubs of enthusiasts for the insight with all sorts of helpful and not so helpful tips on how to get the best mileage possible out of the car. They range from very obvious stuff like upping the tire pressure to arcane (and in my opinion, dangerous) things like using Bernoulli's principle to pull the car along in the air behind a Semi. I never tried that one. Theres something very very wrong about tailgating a truck in that little car...
In any case, people boast about their mileage. One guy claimed that by using a number of factors, he was able to get the car up to 90 MPG.
It is certainly an interesting breed of automobile enthusiasts. Very much into car performance, but not in the traditional sense.
Some links:
http://www.insightcentral.net/http://www.edmunds.com/reviews/longterm/articles/44027/page017.html
They range from very obvious stuff like upping the tire pressure to arcane (and in my opinion, dangerous) things like using Bernoulli's principle to pull the car along in the air behind a Semi. I never tried that one. Theres something very very wrong about tailgating a truck in that little car...My Dad, the ultimate cheapskate, used to draft behind semis in order to wring the maximum gas mileage out of his Isuzu P'up. As we'd pulled up to the semi, there would a lot of turbulence and buffeting, then as we moved in even closer, things would suddenly get really calm and smooth. We called this the "bubble". I'd guess that the gas mileage was helped, but like you said, it seemed kind of dangerous. And sometimes the truckers didn't like it and would do things to shake Dad off their tail, like slowing way down and changing lanes a lot. I'm chuckling now that I think about it. I had kind of forgotten about it.