pb's Forum Comments

Showing comments 1-30 of 195 by pb.

Pulse and Glide?

[Just a note--I edited the link in your post to point to a more descriptive explanation of pulse & glide at a less ad-laden site.]
posted by pb January 7 at 1:58 PM

Facebook Connect

heh, yeah that works. But for people who aren't as technically plugged in, I think Facebook Connect would be a friendlier option.
posted by pb January 6 at 2:16 PM

I've been looking into Facebook Connect, and it looks like you can link accounts at any time.

I don't think we'd send all existing fuel-ups to Facebook, just those going forward after you connect your Fuelly and Facebook accounts. And the data would all be stored here at Fuelly just as it is now.

I'm also looking at finding existing friends on Fuelly by matching up your Facebook friends, but I think posting fuel-ups to your Facebook news feed is the most interesting feature of Facebook Connect.
posted by pb January 6 at 1:50 PM

Gallons per 100 miles

This is one of the reasons we include Avg L/100km (Liters per 100 kilometers) in the stats even for people tracking with MPG. But I realize numbers related to liters aren't as meaningful as numbers related to gallons for those of us in the US. But much of the world is already comparing fuel economy with that type of metric.
posted by pb January 6 at 7:56 AM

Vehicle National Location

True, it looks like the International Ford Focus should be a separate model from the US/Canada Ford Focus. I think that would be a cleaner way to separate them for comparison.

Since people can add custom models here, someone could add "Focus (Int.)" to the list of Ford models to start a new branch.

We do track members' home countries if they decide to share it. So it would be possible to place a country flag on the list of some vehicles while browsing based on where the owner lives. But if a car is really a completely different model and only shares the name, I think starting a separate model in the system is the best way to track that.
posted by pb January 6 at 7:48 AM

Vegetable oil fuel type

Just to add to what matt said, we decided to leave tracking different fuel mixes (octanes, ethanol percentages) to each individual user because that can vary from fuel-up to fuel-up. So for now you could note when you're using SVO/WVO for each individual fuel-up in either the notes or tags fields. And our plan is to have more statistics and reporting around tags down the road so you can compare different fuel types.
posted by pb December 24 at 10:29 AM

UK setting incorrectly showing kilometers?

You should be seeing miles for the distance unit everywhere in the UK view now.
posted by pb December 22 at 11:51 AM

ok, we'll get things moved over to miles when we can.
posted by pb December 20 at 6:30 PM

So do vehicles track distance with miles or kilometers in the UK? I thought people use km for distance but UK MPG for comparing fuel economy. When giving directions would you say it's about 120 miles from London to Bristol, or would you say it's about 200 kilometers?
posted by pb December 20 at 5:22 PM

Avg L/100km changes with different units selected

Got it, thanks. Fixed now.
posted by pb December 17 at 9:28 AM

The top stat was correct. The "alternate measure" stat (that's what we call the bottom-left stat) had an extra conversion going on for the UK display that was throwing the number off. That's fixed up now, thanks for letting us know.
posted by pb December 17 at 9:16 AM

Extended fuel mileage plots?

Nope, we haven't. Do you know of any good SVG graphing packages?
posted by pb December 16 at 1:51 PM

Wrong litres per gallon calculations!

No problem. Yeah, it is kind of confusing that you have to set your country in your profile AND switch the display to US, UK, or Metric. We should probably just switch the display for you when you set your country in your profile.
posted by pb December 15 at 11:09 AM

Extended fuel mileage plots?

There's no way to do that now, and the software we use to make graphs is fairly limited in what we can do. But we're looking into ways to do more with the graphs. Extending the main graph timeline is high on our to-do list.
posted by pb December 11 at 1:29 PM

Additional sort filters

These are something we'll consider, they're not possible right now.

We don't ask people to report whether their car is automatic or manual transmission when they create a car, so I don't think that part will be possible until we add that option—and then it would be only cars created after that option was introduced.

The other options (downloading CSV, selecting multiple years to compare) would be possible, it's just a matter of designing an interface and developing them. So we'll include it when we're considering features to add.
posted by pb December 11 at 10:11 AM

Request: browse users by best/worst MPG.

Yeah, that sounds very useful for non-gas fuels (since 90% of the vehicles listed run on gas). I'll think about what browsing by fuel type might look like.
posted by pb December 10 at 1:34 PM

We're not going to add sorting by best MPG for the reasons outlined here: Why don't you list everything in order of best fuel economy?. Basically, we don't want to encourage bad data.

We've talked about tracking different fuel grades in the past. Currently we just distinguish fuels based on the type of fuel a vehicle consumes. So Gas, Diesel, CNG, LPG, Flex, and Hybrid are tracked separately. Those are based on what the vehicle consumes. There are different grades of gas, and my understanding is that e85 is a grade of ethanol gas, not necessarily related to the type of engine that can consume it. You could note which tanks you fill with e85 in the notes or tags for that fuel-up. But for now there's no separate tracking, just as there's no separate tracking for different octane levels.
posted by pb December 8, 2008 at 10:50 AM

Suggestion: "Invite Friends/Family" Link

We get this suggestion a lot but we've been very hesitant to add it just based on our personal experience with social sites. The social flood has slowed down now, but we used to get automated invitations to social networks seemingly by the dozens every day—to the point that social spam was rivaling pitches for viagra.

I appreciate the approach that you took, and I pay much closer attention to a personal email from a friend or family member than I do from an automated mass email from a website. That's why we added this FAQ:

How do I invite friends to Fuelly?

I realize it does make it a bit harder to add someone as a friend on the site, and that is a downside to our approach. But we're trying to keep everyone's email inbox as useful as possible by specifically not adding an invite everyone I know feature. I can't say we won't ever add it, but that's our thinking up to this point.
posted by pb December 6, 2008 at 9:15 AM

Fuelly for Maintenance?

yeah, I think cee nailed the heart of the problem with adding a scheduled maintenance feature here. Every model has its own recommended schedule, and that information is usually tucked away inside an owner's manual. If car manufacturers made that information available to the public in a digital format, we could probably match things up here and easily send reminders based on odometer readings.

Without access to that data, the best we could do is allow Fuelly members to input their own maintenance schedule by hand which is no small task. While I'm sure a number of people would do it, I'm not sure enough would do it to make developing that feature worthwhile. That's something we'll have to weigh.
posted by pb December 5, 2008 at 11:08 AM

Fuel cost per litre

We round the price to two decimal places on the car profile page to conserve space, but on your fuel-up log (example), the price is to three decimal places.

Do you want to see three decimal places on your last ten fuel-ups as well?
posted by pb December 3, 2008 at 8:26 AM

100,000 fuel-ups!

I'm also curious about how temperature affects my MPG because it seems like I get much worse mileage in the winter. This will be my first winter with Fuelly so I should get a sense of how much worse it really is.
posted by pb December 1, 2008 at 3:24 PM

Well, our collective fuel economy across the board at this moment is 17.51 MPG (13.43 L/100km and 21.04 UK MPG). I don't have an easy way to compare our collective MPG vs. EPA estimates, but that would be interesting.
posted by pb December 1, 2008 at 11:16 AM

More Fuelly graphics?

Sure no problem:


http://www.fuelly.com/images/fuelly-logo-89x64.gif


http://www.fuelly.com/images/fuelly-logo-71x51.gif

If we come up with some more clever buttons, banners, or badges we'll post them here. We should probably put a page up with copy and paste HTML for these too. And thanks for the link!
posted by pb November 26, 2008 at 1:55 PM

Sure, we can put something together. What did you have in mind?

Here's a version of the Fuelly logo with a white background:



And to embed this image somewhere, you could copy and paste the following HTML:

<a href="http://www.fuelly.com/" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.fuelly.com/images/fuelly-logo-white.gif" width="119" height="85" alt="Fuelly" title="Share and compare MPG at Fuelly" border="0"/></a>

But if some other size or graphic would work better we could probably do something else too.
posted by pb November 26, 2008 at 12:17 PM

List of all entries

You can view all of the entries for your Blazer here:

http://www.fuelly.com/driver/ducky/blazer/log

To get there in the future, go to your blazer profile page:

http://www.fuelly.com/driver/ducky/blazer

And look for the link that says, "View All Fuel-ups" directly under the table that shows your last 10 fuel-ups.
posted by pb November 25, 2008 at 8:28 PM

Estimated Hwy MPG

We've talked about including a slider on the fuel-up page that lets you estimate what percentage of city vs. highway driving you think you had for the last tank. I do think it'd be fun to start accumulating that data, but I don't think it's going to be very accurate. Which means a city/highway slider (and any stats that come from that input) could end up being frustrating for people who want precision.
posted by pb November 25, 2008 at 5:33 PM

Forum banner code incorrect?

Thanks for letting us know about these problems. It sounds like BBcode and phpBB are just trying to keep up with problem scripts in their signature files.

I changed the sig stuff a bit so you might try it out now and see if it works. I added .png to the end of the image files, shortened the image file URLs, and cleaned up the HTML a bit so it's around 200 characters.
posted by pb November 25, 2008 at 5:28 PM

Estimated Hwy MPG

Yeah, I'm not quite sure what you're asking about here. I'm guessing you'd like Fuelly to calculate your highway vs. city mileage?

Maybe if we had a way for people to report what percentage of a tank was used for what type of driving we could show some sort of statistics about highway versus city, but I think even that would be fairly wild guessing by all parties.
posted by pb November 24, 2008 at 1:05 PM

Graph not updating?

The graph only plots fuel-ups where MPG is calculated. Since several of your fuel-ups are marked as partial, you've only had MPG calculated on two of your fuel-ups so far. Once you start adding a few filled tanks in a row, you'll get more entries on the graph.
posted by pb November 20, 2008 at 6:34 PM

US/Imperial mpg figures

We finally broke down and added imperial gallons to the display options. Here's more info: UK MPG Added.
posted by pb November 20, 2008 at 3:23 PM