We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

We sold the Solara ( FINALLY!!!!! ) and after almost a month of looking,driving around, seraching craigslist, cars.com, autotrader.com and others. We found a 2000 Chevy Prizm LSI. Low miles 79,000. sun roof. We bought it from the orignal owner,with all the records on the repairs and maint on the car. The car is in super great shape. Just normal wear on the body. They guy actually special ordered this with a sunroof and side air bags. And the guy was nice enough to fill the tank for us. I've haven't done anything to it yet except hooked up the scan gauge. I'll be posting pics and in the next couple of week i'll be posting how it's doing on the mpg. I just wanted to share, it's been a FIGHT to sale the Solara (it almost took a year to sale it. ) and another fight to find a car in the price range we wanted. Updates to come.:D

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

congrats!

2000 was the first year of the "toyota" VVTI motor. the 5 speed has fantastic acceleration and great fuel economy. https://www.gassavers.org/garage/view/1239

is that an auto tranny? if so, i hope by 2000 they quit making that worthless 3 speed!

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

I think They made the 3 speed until 2002. But the 2000 LSi is a 4 speed automatic. I double checked before buying it.

It has over-drive. The 3 speed doesn't have it. Plus when I test drove it, I counted the changes. :)
So far the scan gauge is showing a 34mpg average. Let's see how this tank goes.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

just make sure to go through the calibration procedure on the scangauge to really dial in the mileage.

those are good cars. what is the motor in it? is it the 1.8, 1.5, maybe something else? just curious.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

Already reset the scan gauge for the prizm. It's a 1.8l. They made a 1.6l 3 speed auto until....1998 I think. But then they just had the 1.8 in 5 speed manual, 3 or 4 speed auto.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

I would assume it is similar to the corolla one. buddy of mine has a corolla S with the 5 speed manual and routinely gets 38ish MPG. it is a 2009 so that helps too. I am barely beating him with my yaris at 41ish mpg.

my brother had a geo prizm back in the day. he really thought it was a race car. wrapped it around a tree about a year after he got it. I want to say it was a '93 or so. this was back in '94 or '95 I think. it has been a while but it held up good until the whole tree incident.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

Something I notice with this car and I'm wondering if anyone else has this problem with any other car. The gas gauge will go up or down depending on if I'm turning left or right, if the car is go up or down hill. It makes it hard to know where the needle should be at any given time. So i've been check my scangauge to see how many gallons i've used. But has anyone else seen this happen before. Our Vibe doesn't do that.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

Yup, it's pretty common.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

ok. Thanks Divine bovine.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

is there anyway to fix or stop this from happening?

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

Not really. As you go around the corner the fuel sloshes back & forth in the tank. In the 70's & 80's Ford used weaker than normal magnets in the fuel gauge, so the needle was slow to react, and it ended up resting at an average reading of the highs & lows. late model vehicles take a sampling of the highs & lows fed to the gauge unit over a few minutes, and display an average of those readings, so the gauge doesn't really move from going around a corner or up & down hills.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

90s Hondas were terrible about this. I could have 3/4 of a tank but have the gauge show empty if I went around an off-ramp too quickly.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

I bet you can buy or make a damping circuit.

You might try replacing the fuel level sender; it may be designed to avoid sudden movements and its motion damping component has failed.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

some of the autocross guys actually put baffles in their gas tanks. their issue is that when they are hard cornering, they can actually lose fuel to the pickup all together. it is a very expensive fix. most guys that experience this once or twice get in the habbit of just topping it off.

it is a fixable problem but not cheaply I don't think.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

I have a 97 prizm 3 speed, rated at 22/27. no lockup torque converter, no overdrive, and 60mph was at 3000 rpm. The best i can get was 33 mpg at 60 mph on the scangauge, all highway. it was very bad for the fe compared with the size of the car. 98+ prizms are a little better, they are rated at 30mpg highway for the 3speed auto, so 3mpg better.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

his is a 4 speed.
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sending units should be done w/ the pump...easier than most to get to(under rear seat), but the part is expensive. when the time comes, i'd go OEM.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

yea i forgot to mention i knew his was a 4 speed. I wished I had the 4 speed on mines, but on the other hand I rarely use it for highway, only once in a blue moon.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

Topping off is best for most any racing application because you don't want 1/2 of a tank of gas being tossed around from side to side adding weight to the cornering of the car and/or as you're suggesting, leaving your pickup with nothing to actually pick-up!

Very common of GM's though to have a floating fuel gauge needle. My Camaro as well as my pickup truck do this, both are Chevrolet.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

In racing, topping off may stabilize the contents but it also adds weight...

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

As for SOLO II racing, cone race courses in parking lots, what most everyone practices is filling up the tank prior to the race. There are a lot of REALLY hard on the brakes then 90* turns in this type of racing where it would be easy to starve a fuel pump vs. the big sweeping turns of say an HPDE (High Performance Driving Experience) course on a road course like Putnam, Mid-Ohio, Laguna Seca type tracks where they can probably get away with filling up 1/2 a tank.

Even on the national level, the extra weight of 6 or 7 gallons on a Solo II cone track isn't that big of deal. Most people would rather have the confidence of stability vs. the extra .05 second or so benefit of dropping 30 lbs. A lot of competitive racers in Solo II even bring a friend or request people sit in the passenger seat for the races to help balance out the car. You don't see this as much in those who have relocated the battery to the passenger side of the trunk.

I've heard before in drag racing at least, that every 100 lbs you take off the car you gain one-tenth of a second ET. 30 lbs of fuel in a SCCA Solo race where top speeds rarely exceed 70 mph isn't going to be very much difference.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

that buddy of mine drives his car to the event that can be up to 4 hours away. he said he never really gave it much thought until it happened to him a few times. it made for a hard day because they were doing it in a colluseum parking lot that charged you to come and go. he decided not to pay the $8 it would have cost him to leave the parking lot and re-enter after filling up.

he didn't do too well that day but has topped off ever since.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

ok,thanks for the ideas.but i guess i'll leave it be. But just a quick idea, here we are getting high 90's and 100's with the heat index at 106 to 116 the last few days and I've been running the AC( I have too,i know it cuts MPG alitte,but i can not STAND the heat here)And the Prizm is still averaging between 35 - 37 MPG. I was hoping to do my a good base first tank(no a/c, windows up..etc) but thanks to this heat, it's not going to be my true base line. But I should get a pretty good idea what it would be.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

Don't feel bad about running the A/C. You can't concentrate on driving efficiently when you're very uncomfortable.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

very true.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

Just added the first gaslog/base line for our car. 36.68 MPG!!! Thank you Gassavers.org
Also I just added a pic of the car. This was taken just today in the super heated sun.

Re: We bought a great gas saver......FINALLY
 

here's your summit for the automatic 4cyl car...which happens to be a prizm...way to go Bruce!...https://www.gassavers.org/garage/view/274