Last week for a few days I noticed that my car was getting unusually lousy gas mileage, decreased approx. 10% compared to normal, and even felt a bit sluggish to boot. Maybe the perceived sluggishness was me trying to stay off the throttle a bit to improve gas mileage, I don't know. Anyway after a few days I finally checked my tire pressure and found that 3 tires were at 38 psi, while my front driver tire was around 36 psi. [I recently had a small screw removed from that tire and I suspect now that it might be leaking slowly]. I pumped all four tires up to 39 psi and noticed an immediate improvement in gas mileage, right back to where it normally is. It's been back to normal for a couple days now.
I guess this is old news to everyone, but I'm really surprised at how much the tire pressure affects fuel efficiency on this car. Maybe it's like that with all cars but this one has more accurate or immediate readouts on fuel consumption. But I find it surprising that at 38 psi, which is above the owner's manual recommendation of 36F/33R if I remember correctly, yields such crappy mileage versus 39 psi. Or, is it the differential between the one 36psi tire and the rest of the 38 psi tires that is causing the increased fuel consumption?
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Originally Posted by onlyaudis
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