I am curious why my fuel mileage drops so much when the temperature gets below 40 degrees. My wife and I are retired (11years) and don’t go anywhere but to the post office (31/2 mies) the grocery store (6 miles) and to visit our married daughters one lives 12 miles away and the other one about 26 miles. In warm weather we average 40 and a few tenths consistently, but when it gets cold we only get 34 and change. I’m blaming it on the CVT but don’t have any proof.Any ideas?
ALL cars get worse mpg’s in the winter. CVT, manual transmission or conventional automatic all get less.
It takes fuel to warm the engine to operating temp. You let the car idle to warm it up for these short trips. The short trip don’t fully warm the engine and oils so it uses more fuel. You turn on electrical things like seat heaters, the defroster grid on the back window, headlights and similar that don’t run during the summer and all require more from the engine to turn the alternator… Short trips mean you run the defrosters so the AC compressor runs just like summer. And to top it all off, every bit of oil lubricating the moving parts in the car as you drive is thicker when cold and doesn’t fully warm up on short drives.
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The 2017 CRV is rated 28 city and 34 highway so this person is beating that by a lot. And using his description of driving that 40 mpg figure is amazing.
Lloyd, you have never noticed that winter mileage is less or have you not been checking fuel usage until now ?
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All the above plus your tires are stiffer with more rolling resistance when cold, and if you have not put more air in them recently they may be underinflated (if they were properly inflated during warm weather), which also decreases MPG.
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One additional factor is the winter blend gasoline, which doesn’t contain as much energy as the summer blend gasoline:
https://newsroom.aaa.com/2013/06/what-is-the-difference-between-summer-and-winter-blend-gasoline/
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I don’t think that there is a vehicle in existence whose gas mileage doesn’t plummet in cold weather.
Has the OP never before noticed this phenomenon?
Too amazing. I suspect a measurement error somewhere in the chain.
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