Driving any distance in a vehicle requires that you have a certain amount of fuel to reach your destination. The amount of miles that can be driven per gallon of fuel depends on many factors including the type of car you drive. In order to know how much it will cost you to drive a specific distance in a specific vehicle, you will have to know how to figure miles per gallon or MPG. Whether you are planning a long distance road trip, and you want to estimate costs, or you are interested in knowing what kind of fuel economy your car is achieving, figuring the cost of mileage for car travel is the way to obtain the answers you seek.
Fill up your gas tank at the gas station, and reset your trip odometer to zero. Your tank can have any amount of gas in it when you do this. It does not have to be almost empty.
If you are not able to use a trip odometer, record your vehicle's current mileage reading in a log book or a PDA.
Drive your vehicle as you normally do, until the gas tank is almost empty. If you drive faster than normal, or drive in extreme traffic, you will not obtain an accurate average MPG calculation for your vehicle.
Go to the gas station to refuel your vehicle. Before resetting the trip odometer, record the amount of miles you drove in the log book or the PDA, or write down the current mileage of your vehicle.
After refilling your gas tank, write down the exact number of gallons that were pumped into your vehicle. Include the decimal point.
If you wrote down the actual total mileage on your car's odometer, instead of using the trip odometer, you will need to subtract the previous mileage from the current mileage. For example, if your vehicle had 25,399 when you first filled up your gas tank, and now it has 25,787, subtract 25,399 from 25,787 which equals the total miles driven: 388.
If you used a trip odometer, it will register the total number of miles driven.
Divide the number of miles you drove between gasoline fill-ups by the amount of gasoline you just pumped into your gas tank. For example, if you drove 388 miles, and you pumped 15.4 gallons into your vehicle, you would divide 388 by 15.4 which equals 25.194 miles per gallon.
Record the miles per gallon figure, along with the date, in your log book or PDA for future reference.
The average MPG for your car can be used to figure the approximate cost of a known trip. Divide the total number of miles that you expect to drive by the MPG for your vehicle to find out how many gallons of gas you can expect to use. Multiply this figure by the average cost per gallon of fuel in your area.
