EPA Updates for Fuel Economy
 

In 2008 the EPA updated their way for calculating fuel economy to be under more realistic driving conditions, and as a result, most cars have lower fuel economy. However, the EPA Estimates on the bottom of each page is still not reflected. Is there a reason these aren't being changed?

Yeah, the reason is that the EPA doesn't make the new numbers available in a format that sites like Fuelly can use. The EPA makes their fuel economy data available here, and that's the data we used when we set up the site. But that data uses the old estimates.

We've written to the EPA several times asking them to make the new numbers available. We've tried to come up with the formula they used to convert the old numbers to new, and we haven't been able to do it. Once they make that data available we'll update it.

How about letting users enter temporary EPA numbers in their profile to be overridden once the EPA makes its data available in a usable form? If a user enters invalid information, they would only be affecting themselves.

We're not set up for that right now, Houckster. We'd need to start keeping tracking of separate EPA numbers for each user. And they would be affecting others because anyone viewing their page would see the false numbers and assume they're official EPA numbers.

There might be a way to crowdsource EPA changes, but it's a fairly small part of Fuelly and we haven't felt like the gain we'd get is worth the effort required to update them all by hand.

oh, I should mention that we don't mind spot-updating certain listings with the new numbers. If you can just send us a link on the EPA site showing the new numbers for that model we can get it changed on our end.

The EPA site is kind of a pain to navigate, so having the link in hand makes the whole process a lot easier.