Standardized Modifications Form
 

I was thinking that if a form containing most of the common modifications were part of the garage profiles that it would then be much easier to analyze which modifications contributed to % over EPA increases. There'd just need to be check boxes for each of the modifications. I suppose radio buttons for the type of driving you do might be helpful as well. I live in a mountain area, do little city driving, but have snowy road conditions for part of the year, for example.

I know this would be a lot of work and would possibly yield little benefit, but I'm just throwing it out there.

I have a great respect for people with the love statistics. What would make it hard is people like me who's only real way of A-B B-A testing is the "Fill up the gas tank method." And quite frankly I don't have time for that. I've yet to discover a real time fuel consumption instrumentation that works for my Dual Point Fuel Injection system.

I wonder how many people may fit into the same category as me.

On the other hand I would love for our garages to have categories of different driving techniques. For example for me it would look like this:

How do you drive:

Flat Ground: Pulse & Engine Off Glide. Highway: 60mph down to 50mph (45mph when I can) Around Town: Speed limit down to 5/10 under the speed limit.

Uphills: Pulse and Glide unless it takes more than 70% throttle then I'll drive steady throttle. I'll try to hit my maximum pulse just over the top of the hill at the beginning of the descent.

Downhills: DFCO or EOC when possible. Or Pulse and Engine-Off Glide to with the attempt to hit my "Goal minimum speed" at the bottom of the hill/descent.

Stoplights: Shut off when anticipating to idle longer than 15 seconds.

Maybe an entry in the gaslog for summer vs winter? Then there could be broken out averages. That's what I do in my own personal spreadsheet (see title line left).

If enough people were interested, I could make a publicly editable google spreadsheet for this, rather than it being a website modification.

I applaud Google's efforts with providing online spreadsheets and documents but it's very limited with its efficiency. Plus there too many hands in the cookie jar before something gets messed up.

Maybe we should have a Site Suggestion Forum Category.

Yeah, it's definitely limited. What I really want is a database as well. I know you can hack together one using a spreadsheet, but that is just annoying.

Following the above progression, it ends up where the amount of data involved to try to compare accurately and predict someone's potential gains is HUGE.

Driving style could easily have 100 (or more) attributes, many of them measured in percentage instead of boolean. The same could be said of terrain, environmental conditions, car technology, modifications. If someone managed to put all that effort together to build it, then there's the issue of voluntary data entry...most people won't be willing to enter all the data or even completely understand the data that needs to be entered.

I don't mean to sound discouraging, but after reading the ideas above, that's where my mind went with it. The ideas above would probably be an improvement without taking it to the extreme I describe.

I think your point is well taken: don't try and capture all variations, just stick to the biggies. If few enough, it may just be easier for experienced people to hand generate and sort a list.

Last night I learned more about Google Document's "forms" feature. It allows you to make an easy to use survey you can send to people or embed in a web page to make data entry into a spreadsheet easier for people. Better than everyone having direct access to the underlying documents, that's for sure!

One weird thing is that you can't have them enter a number directly, just text (both one line and also a paragraph option), a choice from a range of integer values, a generic multiple choice option (couple different flavors, but same end result), and a checkbox system (basically multiple choice where you can select more than one). Guess they wanted to put some bounds on user choice. Wish they'd allowed a number, but with range restrictions. Think I'll email them and request it.