How's my mileage?

Gas mileage sounds good... those short trips add up and do cause mpg to go down a small bit, but yours is only 1/2 mpg. Nothing to be concerned about. Definitely pick up a grease gun and hit all those zerk fittings every time you change the oil. Change the spark plugs, just go with stock replacements. I have never had any luck with all those platnium and other fancy ones. Air filter is obvious, keep it clean. What weight oil do you use? A 0w-30 or 5w-30 synthetic may help get an extra mpg... No worries with switching to a synthetic at 80k, you will be fine. If you are interested in gettting an oil analysis, check out

have used their services before and they are quick and accurate. They willsend you a free test kit with everything you need to send a sample in.Be sure to keep your tires inflated. My Tacoma mauual says 26 psi, which Ican't stand. Way too spongy. I keep them at 36 front and 32 rear.Underinflated tires will drop your mpg too.The best way to tell when you O2 sensor goes bad is that your mpg willreally take a drop, down to like 15 mpg or worse, yet the vehicle will runfine and you will never know the difference. Obviously right now they arefine, so you might as well wait it out for a bit, since they are not cheap.A great maintenance item to do when you change the oil and plugs is to use acombustion chamber cleaner. I like the Mopar brand that Dodge, Chrysler,etc. sell at their parts dept. This is the best time because this stuff willtrash the oil and sometimes fouls up a plug or two.Basically you warm up the car, spray the whole can directly into thethrottle body. Then turn off the engine and let it sit for a couple hours.When you re-start, it will be rough and die a few times on you. Rev theengine up and be amazed by the huge nasty cloud coming out of your vehicle.You will probably get a check engine light, which will come on because of amis-fire condition, which is perfectly normal with this stuff. Take a runaround the block a few times, accelerate hard to get it out of the engine,until its running smooth. When you get back home, disconnect the batterycable to reset the check engine light while you go about changing the oiland spark plugs.

My 96 V-6 gets only 10-13 in the city dealer said "Thats normal".

We keep the tires aired to specs, and check them any time we do more than a short trip in town. Never used anything more than stock plugs, they've never let me down (and we know all about checking the gap, etc.) I think I'll be replacing the plug wires this year since the distributor cap's a little corroded inside (cleaned up ok and works fine now, but no telling for how long.) I use 10w30 dino juice. I'm keen on the 'natural' stuff over synthetic, cost being the main issue. My parents had a Ford escort go a good 350K on synthetic (and farther if it weren't for an exhaust manifold leak, it's currently parked.) So I do know the pros and cons of the different types of oil (as much as it's on the forums, I'd like to avoid discussing it further, LOL.) I'm figuring the oil to be the proper weight for our climate- very hot dry summers (triple digit temps) and wet, foggy winters that don't go much below freezing. Air filter's a K&N, we keep an eye on it with the dry dusty conditions. Don't need a lecture on their usefulness, it's already purchased and in use- no troubles with it and we've gotten our money's worth so far. ;) On the combustion chamber cleaner... is that really neccessary with a well maintained vehicle (especially a Toyota)? To me that just sounds like overkill. I was going thru the manual and there's a lot of repairs and maintenance that sound more obsessive than necessary, like adjusting the pedal height every 12 months/15K miles and steering wheel free play every 6 months. Are there really any practical people out there that are *that* nitpicky with their car upkeep? I'm pretty picky myself (my engine bay has to be clean, even if the truck's exterior and interior are filthy) but I'm not out there measuring things with a ruler or volt meter every 6 months. I would genuinely like to keep it in top shape though, I plan for this to be my 'first and last' vehicle (hey, it could outlive me!) or keep it till it rots and rusts away.

I'd say don't worry about it yet. Your range is only 3.2 (15% of the average). that's not too bad. Winter/summer differences affect my milage by 10% or so. Plus you say there are a number of short trips in the last year that you didn't have earlier. That could easily account for the small (2%) drop last year. The yearly average is covering a big chunk of the information. I'd make a plot of milage vs date for each fill-up. From there your eye will tell you if there's been a constant decline over time or if you normally get a good milage and that the tanks with the short trips are just eating into your average. You should be able to see any trends with your eye (if there really are any).

mike