Mpgpp
 

Miles Per Gallon Per Person. Anyone else use this when calculating mileage in groups?

It's fairly simple. You take the mileage of a car and multiply it by the number of people. That tells you what mileage each person would have to be getting if you were all going solo (individual cars vs pooling) and use the same amount of gas.

I'm planning a road trip with some friends and had to explain this to them since they'd never heard of it.

There will be 6 of us and we have the option of just loading everyone up in a friend's 03 Suburban or taking two cars (an 08 G6 V6 and an 05 Civic Si).

The Suburban gets 17mpg freeway. 17mpg x 6 people is 102 mpgpp.

G6 would be 26mpg x 3 people so 78 mpgpp. This one needs averaged with the Civic Si at 29mpg x 3 people so 87mpgpp. Averaged this gives us 82.5 mpgpp.

So 102 MPGPP vs 82.5 MPGPP. They argue that the two cars are still more efficient while I argue that the suburban is.

Another way I have tried explaining it is that to match the same fuel usage of the suburban for all of us to go individually would take us all using vehicles that get 102mpg each. To match the two cars would only take vehicles that got 82.5 mpg.

Solution, cram 5 in the Civic, hypermiling it to 40mpg and you follow drafting it on the Rebel, problem solved y.w. :D

I'd rather ride in the trunk lol

That's a cool bike for farting around town but traveling on it is about as bad as Los Angeles to Dallas was on the Ural.

Just add up the estimated number of gallons for each vehicle combo.

Suburban will burn ___ gallons, and cost each of you $__, the two cars will burn .. etc.

Yeah, I think you'll need to do it by the added up gallons or by a measure of fuel per distance...wouldn't this be a case where MPG fails as a measurement, but GPM (or g/1000m or l/100km) would be much more effective?

Either way, the argument of which will be more efficient can be settled without a doubt by simply adding up the total gallons used.

If the trip was 100 miles, the civic would use 3.448 gallons, the G8 would use 3.846 gallons, together that's 7.334. The suburban would use 5.88 gallons.
At $2 per gallon that's a savings of $2.90 for every 100 miles traveled.
Split 6 ways comes out to 48 cents per person for every 100 miles traveled.
How long is this trip?


Would the group of 6 be happier on a long trip in one large vehicle or two smaller vehicles?

I kinda figured all in the larger vehicle cuz it gives us the ability to joke around and screw off as a group instead of 2 in one car and 4 in the other or 3 and 3.

The total trip will end up being about 850 miles.

Multiply MPG X number of passengers. Single vehicle wins. Of course it would also depend on whether all the passengers would tolerate being limited to a single vehicle in local driving at the destination.

regards
gary

The airline industry measures seat cost per mile. You could do the same for your friends. Or even calculate seat-cost for the whole trip. Hopefully they'd believe you then.