mathowie's Forum Comments

Showing comments 1-30 of 174 by mathowie.

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Sorry about that, I removed it. I was hoping to help publicize the SMS feature more, but forgot about the upper right links it covered.
posted by mathowie March 8 at 10:00 PM

Price per gallon graphed along with MPG?

We tend to stress the stats on Fuelly that you have control over, so you can practice better driving habits, etc.

Price is really out of our hands for the most part (aside from picking which station you get fuel at) so we're at the whims of the marketplace.

Seeing a graph of price over time doesn't really help me as a driver too much with figuring out how much I'll pay next time, since price can fluctuate up or down 10+ cents every week.
posted by mathowie March 7 at 8:37 AM

Fuel type selection

We're aiming Fuelly for a mainstream audience of drivers trying to improve their economy, so our focus is on keeping things simple and not mucking up our data entry forms with too many options that would lead people to think adding fuel ups is a ton of work mentally.

That said, you can track different fuel types or grades in the notes field about each fuel up and I've seen users say their ethanol % with each fuel up.

Also, I'd consider myself somewhat of a car guy and I honestly have no idea what RON even means, so I suspect the vast majority of our users would be confused by an option for it as well.
posted by mathowie March 3 at 5:58 PM

Potential Savings Per Fuel-up

Fgozalo, we added that feature because we're familiar with the idea as Americans of doing a little bit better driving to gain 1,2, and 3mpg. They seemed like real-world amounts that are achievable by drivers wanting to change their habits, and I thought it'd be great to add a dollar value to show how much small changes would add up to on the next tank.

That said, I have no idea how real world changes in driving habits are reflected in L/100km. Just doing rough conversions via Google, maybe it'd be reductions of 0.5L/100km that are somewhat equivalent to 1mpg better economy?
posted by mathowie February 28 at 7:27 PM

Privacy

Yeah, just to expand on what pb said, we don't offer private accounts because the data is all aggregated publicly, and we didn't want to create an issue where we are showing data publicly from private users in the averages but people browsing car information can't get to all the data.
posted by mathowie February 16 at 7:12 AM

TOP 10 best by fuel economy

We've considered lots of different top 10 lists, but tend to shy away from performance-based lists. We do this because the site is so easy to game and lets users post fake data if they wanted.

Right now, there's no real reason to do that (we don't list the highest MPG first in any listings) but if there was an incentive like you get to appear first on every page for your car, you can bet some people would be inclined to goose their rankings a bit.

And considering we have lots of car clubs on this site that are very proud of their chosen vehicle, I could see a pretty easy concerted effort from a small group attempting to push their car into the top slot for bragging rights.

Leaderboards are something we avoid here for all these reasons.
posted by mathowie February 15 at 9:48 PM

initial fill up

You're not doing anything wrong, it's just the first fuel up doesn't count immediately towards an average fuel economy, we start measuring by difference on the second tank forward when you track by the odometer.
posted by mathowie January 24 at 9:22 AM

Just a convenience suggestion

I definitely agree that fueling up the wrong vehicle is a problem, it's too easy to do.

You know what would be a simple fix? We should show you a picture/title of the car above the forms.
posted by mathowie January 4 at 5:16 PM

Why can't I see all vehicles

Cool!
posted by mathowie January 2 at 10:00 AM

Fuelly API, Remote Update

Except schmod, we allow users to have multiple cars.

So in effect you'd have to send a text like: "hondacivic 323.3 $2.399 14.301" and remembering both the title of your car plus the order of entry, plus the proper numerals and decimals, it starts getting too complicated for a simple text.

I've found even though I have an iPhone, I'm usually in a hurry so I just jot down the odometer mileage on my gas receipts with a pen in my glove compartment, then about once a month I sit down and log them to the site.
posted by mathowie December 26, 2009 at 4:49 PM

Red number in parentheses within profile

It's your change since last fuel up or change from average, depending on where it shows up. It turns green when things are good (MPG goes up, price goes down, etc) and red when things slip.
posted by mathowie December 14, 2009 at 12:24 PM

An idea for something new.

Yeah, that's not a bad idea to show total miles tracked among all vehicles, total spent on fuel, total fuel ups, etc.
posted by mathowie November 30, 2009 at 7:49 AM

Potential Savings Per Fuel-up Suggestion

We could have put 1, 5, and 10mpg changes, but we realized in testing that for most cars getting ~20mpg in the US, changing your habits and improving economy worked for easy 1-3mpg changes. Going beyond that is quite difficult (a 10% change is easy, a 25% change is major and 50% improvement is impossible) so we didn't put 5mpg or 10mpg down there.

We considered also showing an annual increase in mpg's impact instead of just the next tankful, so maybe it'd say getting 1, 2, and 3mpg could result in hundreds of dollars of savings over the course of the year.
posted by mathowie October 25, 2009 at 9:44 AM

Is all diesel gas created equal?

I'm curious what findings other people have, but for me, I've noticed in my wife's TDI Jetta, going to a cheap station results in bad performance/economy and we had to replace clogged fuel filters every few months. We've stuck with major label brands and haven't had problems since.
posted by mathowie October 7, 2009 at 3:15 PM

Octane rating on Fillup?

Most every car has a manufacturer suggested octane rating for all fuel-ups, which drivers should follow (more octane is usually a waste, as it's more expensive and just burns in your engine the same as cheaper fuel).

Since that's usually an unwavering "87" or "92" it's an added hassle to add it to every fuel stop when for most users, it does not change.

I'd suggest continuing to use the notes field.
posted by mathowie October 2, 2009 at 6:36 AM

iPhone location

Yeah, we added that recently because the new iPhone OS allowed for it. We figured we might want to start trying to associate fill-ups with gas station locations at one point, so having a database of locations associated with fill-ups might be a good place to start, but at the moment we are storing the locations and haven't built any location-based features or interfaces just yet.

When we added the feature, we thought it might only ask for location once, but I've been getting slightly annoyed by it asking every single time.
posted by mathowie August 27, 2009 at 8:01 AM

Completely n00b question

We measure by difference, assuming you fill up the tank to the brim every time. If you imagine that is a maximum number, 100% (units don't matter in this example) we could every fill up for how many units you used up since it was last at 100%, and figure out how far you went to calculate your fuel economy. It's pretty simple.

If you aren't filling up the tank to full, you should check off the "partial fuel up" option and we won't calculate fuel economy for that specific fuel up, but we will for your cumulative fuel economy (which takes all your distance traveled and all fuel ever burned to calculate a total).
posted by mathowie August 25, 2009 at 6:27 PM

comparing apples to oranges...

You can click the "filter" option on the page showing all jettas to see just the gas engine models.

Here is a listing of just Gas L5 engines (Not sure the jetta even has a L5 engine, but people are claiming it does) that excludes all TDI model.
posted by mathowie August 14, 2009 at 2:11 PM

So, do you guys plan on being around for awhile?

Yeah, we've been talking about having a new "reports" tab in the output screens on your own car that would let you produce almost any graph you could imagine based on your data. It's mostly an interface problem to solve (how will it work, how to hide complexity and make it easy to use, etc).
posted by mathowie August 13, 2009 at 12:51 AM

Yes, we will be around for the long haul, on the order of 10+ years at the very least. My main priority is my other site that I created (MetaFilter), where fuelly co-founder pb works on the code for me. We recently celebrated its 10 year anniversary with almost 70 parties on 7 continents and it remains a vibrant community website.

Fuelly is an app both Paul (pb on Fuelly) and I wanted personally for ourselves and we knew the community data could make things more interesting. In terms of costs, Fuelly is very cheap to run. We used a ton of existing code and infrastructure we already had built for MetaFilter and the entire Fuelly app runs on a single webserver that has minor monthly costs. The textads you might see when logged out don't bring in too much money, but even without positive revenue it's comparatively cheap to run the site and the app so I don't see any reason not to keep it running for many, many years.
posted by mathowie August 12, 2009 at 11:03 PM

TDI EPA figures off?

I would have to believe that as technology has improved over the past 30 years so should the mileage

Yeah, I in the same boat as you -- my wife's 1989 Honda Accord got low-30s MPG, but new Accords are a few miles less per gallon and it was sad to think we didn't progress.

But doing a little research reveals cars weigh much more due to much improved safety and engines had to get better to push all that weight around and not feel sluggish. So it's much harder to produce a big, safe, powerful, and efficient modern car.
posted by mathowie August 11, 2009 at 11:51 AM

This post probably came out sounding more like a rant than you intended, but it appears to me as a complete outsider that you are looking for reasons to blame organizations with some pretty wild ulterior motives that I don't think are true.

The EPA figures used to overestimate fuel economy. My wife has had a Jetta TDI since 2002 and we only approached the upper estimates on long road trips where it was 100% freeway driving. They've adjusted downwards and reflect more of what we get in normal driving.

Our TDI figures are skewed due to the high population of TDIclub owners that have migrated here from the VW forums. Like most forums, this is a group of highly motivated people that share a common interest and a way to get noticed in a group like that is to attain a very high MPG figure. I've heard of people in the group that have done a no-A/C, 50mph drive across several states in an attempt to get 60+ MPG using a diesel Jetta. They're not a typical population of Jetta drivers but skewed upwards where 50 or more MPG is standard while me with a scan gauge in my wife's car I can barely top 40MPG.

The CARB rules are based on hybrid engines, plain and simple, and yeah that's unfair when mild hybrids that only get 22MPG are allowed in the lane but the rule was put in place to encourage manufacturers to make more hybrids and buyers to buy more hybrids and it wasn't strictly a high-MPG rule though I'm sure that was the hope in passing it.

It sounds like you could take advantage of the Cash for Clunkers program but you would get a reduced amount like $3,500 instead of $4,500. Is that thousand dollars really preventing you from getting a new car?

I don't think any decision or rule here is due to political contributions or purposeful skewing of data to disadvantage any car makers.
posted by mathowie August 5, 2009 at 9:20 AM

Most Documented Cars

Yeah, there are some people with data going back into the early 1990s, when they bought their cars new.
posted by mathowie August 3, 2009 at 7:35 AM

EPA rating for V6 Venza for Canada

All our estimates are based on the US data (we don't have free data sources for other nations' fuel economy), so maybe we could hide them from non-US users.

Everything on price is done in the major accounts, on the cents, so if you entered 96.4 for price, Fuelly probably complained because it appeared you were spending $96.40 per litre. Input it as $0.964 and it should work out.
posted by mathowie July 20, 2009 at 12:00 AM

Texting input request

Yeah, cost was the issue. This is a free service, but just getting a text short code costs thousands of dollars and runs in the hundreds of dollars per month (at least) to maintain the service. Then the text service only works for US-based users.

There are other shortcode SMS -> web app services out there, but they require really obscure codes, where you'd have to memorize/store 50 bizarre characters.
posted by mathowie July 16, 2009 at 4:27 PM

New cars don't get along with fuelly

Yeah, those first fill ups can't count with a new (either off the lot or new to you used) cars. It's by design -- in the life of any car, you only get one first fill-up and it's not that big of a deal to skip it or set the tripometer for the next fill up, while all the other thousands of fill-ups over the car's lifetime will be easily recorded.

I was a tripometer type of guy when we designed fuelly, but I'd strongly suggest you use this first fillup to start using it with the Odometer. With the odometer tracking, you'll never have to remember/forget to zero out your tripometer, and when people borrow your car you won't have to explain how to reset the tripometer (though you do have to tell them to write down the mileage if they get gas).
posted by mathowie June 6, 2009 at 9:13 AM

Reasonability checks on input

Yeah, we have reasonability checks in place, but we frequently find people (esp. those in high mileage clubs) break the sanity checks we originally had in place. So we have some checks still around, but they're flexible enough for the rare person hypermiling a hybrid car to 70mpg, but should block someone accidentally entering in 1,000 gallons of fuel at a stop or that they drove 3,500 miles on a single tank.
posted by mathowie June 3, 2009 at 10:52 AM

Potential vs. EPA?

The EPA provides a data download package of all their data, but they update that separately from their live website. It's a bummer, but it's a bit too much work to scrape their live site for the latest data. They really need to update the downloadable data but it seems to lag behind their site data by many months.
posted by mathowie April 10, 2009 at 10:46 AM

Jetta vs. Jetta TDI

We could remove the TDI model designation, and push everyone back onto normal Jettas with the proper engine, and then in the future we could block someone from creating a TDI new model and it won't be available to everyone.

For custom car models, we approve them by hand, and one of us site admins accidentally approved "TDI" as a separate model at some point months ago.

I think we'll align everyone and fix this up next week sometime.
posted by mathowie April 8, 2009 at 7:39 PM

Potential vs. EPA?

The EPA doesn't make the new data available to us yet, but as soon as they do, we'll update them.
posted by mathowie April 6, 2009 at 5:55 PM