bwinterroth
Active Member
- Joined
- April 2, 2005
- Messages
- 58
- Reaction score
- 0
- City, State
- New Jersey
- Year, Model & Trim Level
- 2000 Explorer XLS V6 SOHC
For thee most part my 2000 XLS was getting around 15M MPG on the highway. The way I gagued this was by measuring my trip from college back home (300 miles) and i would fill up my gas tank (20 gallons) before I left. By the time I got home by tank was almost on empty so i calculated that I was getting around 15 MPG on the highway. Back and forth over the course of 2 years i was getting for the most part the same crappy gas mileage. Well with the extremely high gas prices i decided i had to do something about it. My car has 61,000 miles on it so I started by changing the spark plugs with Autolite double platinums. I then changed the wires with new OEM ones. Second, I decided to change my oil to synthetic. Ever since I owned the car, I used regular Castrol GTX or similar non synthetic oil. I changed it with the new Mobil 1 15K mile synthetic oil and a Motorcraft filter. After changing the spark plugs I noticed that there was quite a bit of carbon buildup on the ends so i figured my gas mixture was a bit too rich. I decided to change the air filter with a stock paper one (next time I will get a K&N one) and drilled a few 1/2 inch holes in the front of the stock airbox to allow more air intake. Lastly I used Chevron Techron fuel system cleaner and added it to my tank of gas before I left on my recent trip. I reset my tripometer after I filled my tank and started on my way. The trip consisted of a little more than 400 miles roundtrip and was about 75% highway/ 25% city driving. As my tripometer went past 300 miles on the return leg I was so excited because I still had around a quarter tank left. I ended up filling my tank at about 390 miles but there was definitely another 10-20 miles left in the tank. So I don't know if one or the combination of all these things helped to achieve a 5 MPG increase. Now that the Techron has completed it's cleaning with a tank of gas I look forward to even better gas mileage in the future tanks.
