Well, this is a bit off topic, but a follow up to my last post about my horrible gas milage.....
I was trying to think of what might be the cause, and although I thought that it would be a long shot, I picked up some electronics parts cleaner and cleaned the MAF sensor and the throttle body. I thought that this might help some, but I also thought that if it were really dirty, then the car should be running rough, or throwing a code. Well, I guess I severely underestimated just how sensitive the MAF sensors are on these motors
The throttle body wasn't too bad..it just had some slight carbon build up around the butterflies. The MAF was pretty dirty, which I figured would be the case, since 2 days after I got the car I happened to look at the air filter, and I couldn't believe that the car would even run, much less as strong as it was.
So, I was getting a BEST MPG of around 15....occasionally just tipping 16 on long highway trips. Right after the cleaning, I noticed that the throttle was much more responsive...good sign
So, I reset the MPG indicator (I know that its not 100% accurate, but I was looking to see if there was any immediate improvement that I could directly attribute to cleaning the MAF). The first thing that I noticed on the 2 mile drive to get to the freeway was that the milage indicator was changing much more quickly than it ever had....usually it would hover at a reading for awhile before refreshing.....now it was very steadily increasing. On the way to the freeway it climbed to around 18MPG...better than it had EVER gotten before.
I got on the freeway and drove around 30 miles with the cruise set at 70. MPG steadily climbed and averaged out at 24
I then got off the highway and took a busy main road across town in pretty heavy traffic, and my milage still stayed at around 18.
So, moral of the story....KEEP YOUR MAF SENSOR CLEAN!!!! I gained almost 9 MPG from using a $10 can of electronic parts cleaner, and I'm sure that I'll be much happier with my car now.