Nov012008
FFAR: Tracking My Mileage
Filed under Cars by Kim at 11:18 pm on Nov 01 2008
This is the first and maybe last post in a (non?) series I will call Fun For Anal-Retentives. That reminds me; I should write about my renewal of faith in psychoanalysis (if not Freudian) but I’ll save it. Particularly since this month is NaBloPoMo and without doubt by next week I will be stretching to fill my daily space!
At any rate, since my last car (The Ford Aspire Is Dead, Long Live The Ford Aspire) I’ve kept somewhat meticulous spreadsheets of the interesting data on my gas receipts. I’ve managed to keep about 80% of my actual mileage’s worth of these receipts tracked (I have about 44K miles on the car now) in a google spreadsheet.
Apart from the somewhat boring graphable mileage, I can also keep track of how gas prices are (I end up buying a tank 1-2 times a week, so it’s not the best sample) and if I were just slightly more meticulous I could do something fun with maps. Now, I stay in a window that’s not at all unlike what the maker says is right for the Mazda 3, but since I do this the nice thing is that if there were a consistent dropoff due to some mechanical problem, I’d know about it.
All it takes is making sure you always reset the trip meter and writing that value down on the receipt when you get gas. I take all the receipts out when I clean out my wallet periodically and pile them up for when I have an extra five minutes about once a month and voila. I guess it could be considered a waste of time since mostly what I get is the satisfaction of knowing my car’s working right (and the satisfaction of making a spreadsheet) but it’s so little time that it’s worth it!
