2009 Honda Fit: Revised MPG Opinion

Is it just me or do the insideline cars needs a lot more oil top offs than I'm used to vehicles needing?

The 30mpg is believable. Unless you were playing some kind of hypermiling game, I've a hard time believing 39mpg in the city. It wasn't a constant 40mph with no stops, was it?

The 39 mpg wasn't in the city, it was... "On another fill up from 230 miles of highway driving I just did yesterday, it calculated out to 39 mpg"

Fit owners have been reporting much better mileage than the EPA ratings for some time now. Of course, for the haters out there, this has always been dismissed as owner optimism or else outright BS.

So let me save them the trouble: you are completely full of cr@p and there is NO FREAKIN' WAY the car did that well. What were you doing driving downhill with a tailwind the whole way? Complete BS I tell ya! ;-)

(brn - the 39 was highway)

Because these were at fill-ups, I assume they were calculated mpg by using mileage and gallons of gas used?

Are you guys seeing the same ~+10% reading on the in-car gas mileage computer? It irks me that Honda chose to make the mpg readout that overly optimistic. Since it's always higher than the calculated/actual mpg, they could have applied some correction factor to the calculation to get it closer to correct.

We get better than EPA mileage in our '09 manual... usually 30-34 in town (occasionally higher when I'm trying) and 35-39 on the highway.

I believe it, especially since the car is small an new. I have an elantra that can hit 39 MPG easily on the highway...as long as I keep the RMPs around 2200 or the car between 55 and 60 MPH.

Can you guys also log the average Speed of the car during the trips with MPG?
I find that small cars really eat gas above 70 MPH.

I just know that my Fit usually gets around 20 MPG. Yep.

In the initial fuel economy report I chimed in and said that yes, the Fit DOES blow away the conservative EPA ratings.

I have an 09 Fit Sport and I easily delve deeply into the 40s doing 65-70 mph. Complete city driving is more towards the low 30s.

carguy622, I think oil top-offs are more common in engines that haven't been broken in. Edmunds always has brand-new cars, unlike me.

My bad.

carguy622, these cars are driven very, very hard. As a result, some oil consumption is expected.

I don't believe crystalfivemt's claim of deep 40s (mid-40s?) at 65-70 mph. Not knowing how they calculate fuel economy, how often 40s are reached, weather conditions, hypermiling techniques, I'll admit that it's possible but improbable. Without hypermiling, engine modifications, or some other radical changes, I'll call bullshit, especially for a car rated at only 33-35 on the highway. To regularly beat the EPA by 20% or more at high speeds (65-70) takes some pretty special conditions, I don't care what you're driving.

I don't doubt his word. I just checked the Canadian site (Natural Resources Canada)and the Fit is rated at 41 or 42 mpg hwy (manual vs auto) (converted from L/100km to US Gallons) so beating that be a couple mpg is no big deal.

Everyone knows the EPA numbers are designed to please the foot to the floor, A/C on max crowd. In other words... BS.

just a thought, but wasn't Honda and a few other manufacturers found guilty of purposely setting the mileage readout to read higher mileage traveled than actually traveled. I have a 2005 accord and I know it's part of the affected batch of Honda products because there is no way I've managed 36-40mpg while traveling at 70+mph highway on recent trips from GA to FL and MN to TX.

I wouldn't be surprised if Honda's at it again.

Imagine what the highway mileage would be if it actually had a decent top gear! Those figures are impressive though.

Can anyone explain how the EPA numbers are so far off? Real world tests of most compact cars show average mileage to be in the mid to upper 20s which is close to EPA averages. How does the Fit manage to blow away EPA averages with no effort by the driver?

It's already common knowledge the 09 Fit blows away the EPA ratings in real-world driving. My 09 Sport with manual transmission easily beats the EPA by 10 mpg on average. My current average between city/hwy is 38 mpg. However I explained all of this on an earlier blog so I don't feel like repeating myself.

The only people surprised by this are those who don't own an 09 Fit. The owners however know the EPA must have been testing a Fit at 90 mph with the A/C running and 700 lbs of rocks in the car to get such poor city/hwy ratings.

"It's already common knowledge the 09 Fit blows away the EPA ratings in real-world driving. My 09 Sport with manual transmission easily beats the EPA by 10 mpg on average."

That makes no sense at all. In road tests I have seen (like C&D) the fit has averaged about 30-31mpg in mixed driving which is right on the EPA average.

EPA averages are precisely that: averages. Even if you're a driver who observes speed limits, in some parts of the country your highway driving would be mostly under 65 mph, while in others you'd be driving 70+. In some parts of the country you'd certainly be running the A/C, in others you wouldn't. At some times of year you'd have cold temperatures and precipitation on the road, at others you wouldn't. EPA tests are consistent and useful for comparing cars relative to one another, but not necessarily a predictor of a specific driver's performance in a specific situation.

Averages have confidence intervals, and the expected range for this car's highway fuel economy is 27 mpg to 39 mpg (+/- 6 mpg). The conditions described are near-optimal, so it shouldn't be a surprise that the observed mileage is at the top of the range. It also shouldn't be a surprise that drivers who likely also had favorable conditions and who were particularly careful--accelerating gradually, keeping top speed moderate, not running A/C--might get in the low 40s.

After all, the base version of this car, which has the same power train and, as far as I can tell, significantly differs only by having smaller, skinnier tires and lacking the boy racer body mods, gets 2 mpg better on the EPA tests. Normally I would expect the bigger wheels/tires to do better (they're also lower profile, but each rotation still goes a greater distance without using appreciably greater energy), but I assume the bigger tires are grippier and corner better, while the smaller ones have lower rolling resistance. Different tires on the Fit Sport might produce different results.

"just a thought, but wasn't Honda and a few other manufacturers found guilty of purposely setting the mileage readout to read higher mileage traveled than actually traveled. I have a 2005 accord and I know it's part of the affected batch of Honda products because there is no way I've managed 36-40mpg while traveling at 70+mph highway on recent trips from GA to FL and MN to TX."

Nope. Honda was not "purposely" doing that. One of the companies making some of the gauges for their cars messed up and so the odometers were off by about 3%-4%. That was resolved in late 2006. This did not effect all Hondas. Only those with gauges supplied by a certain company. I read deeply on the details of the lawsuit filed against Honda because I owned a car that was on the borderline according to its build date. Their vans were the main vehicles that had the problem. I don't know about your Accord though.

It could be, and I know this is crazy, but it could be that the Fit is kinda fuel effecient.

@crowb "It could be, and I know this is crazy, but it could be that the Fit is kinda fuel effecient."

How utterly far-fetched! As if! Clearly the more reasonable, sensible and probable explanation is that Honda is engaged in mass consumer deception and Edmunds is in on the gig. ;-)

"Clearly the more reasonable, sensible and probable explanation is that Honda is engaged in mass consumer deception and Edmunds is in on the gig. ;-)"

who said that? The real question is why would the EPA standards be off by 20% for the Fit but not other vehicles. HAvent seen an answer to that one yet.

Consumer Reports, for one, says "Expect 33 mpg overall with the manual shifter and 30 mpg with the automatic, using regular fuel." To get 33 overall, that means something like 30 city, 36 highway. That's a solid 10% difference.

Not to mention that the automatic is EPA-rated the same or higher than the manual... there's more variability if those 2 swapped positions.

As the saying goes, your mileage may vary.

In any case, it will be interesting to see if their mileage keeps coming in high. In our 6 months of ownership, we've had maybe 2 mid-winter tanks come in under 30 mpg. We basically do all city driving and most tanks are in the 32-35 range hand calculated. We've seen high 30's when some highway mileage gets in there, especially if I drive slow (65).

I don't hypermile, and a lot of other Fit owners don't either and I'll say it again, I easily achieve over 40 mpg on the highway. I'm not going by the FE gauge but manually calculating. You should see what other owners are getting...high 40s even 50s.

If you don't believe the owners then what are you going by since you don't own this car? Gut instinct? The reviewer admitted himself that he was skeptical of the mileage reports logged in by other staff members until he got 39 mpg himself and amended his original report.

"who said that? The real question is why would the EPA standards be off by 20% for the Fit but not other vehicles. HAvent seen an answer to that one yet."

As I thought I laboriously explained, the EPA "standards" are not "off" for the Fit and on for other vehicles. There is no conundrum and no inconsistency.

The EPA says the Fit Sport automatic's highway AVERAGE is 33 mpg. The EPA also says (clearly, on the window sticker) that vehicles with a highway AVERAGE of 33 mpg can be expected to deliver BETWEEN 27 mpg and 39 mpg highway for "most drivers." The conditions described in the post are rather favorable: Southern California in March, so presumably warm but not so warm as to require A/C; I'm guessing the area and time of day had few steep grades and little congestion, etc--therefore the entire run was at near-constant speed in overdrive top gear. So the fuel economy was at the top of the range.

A few more simple steps that to my mind in no way constitute "hypermiling"--keeping under 65 mph in a part of the country that has 65 mph limits, no leadfoot acceleration, no sudden braking--and you're over 40 mpg. Under such conditions I've gotten 37 mpg where I normally get only 32-33 mpg, and my car is only rated 28 mpg EPA highway AVERAGE. Keep it under 60 mph, change to lower-rolling-resistance tires, and even better.

The principles for blowing away EPA AVERAGE mileage are the same for any car, but there's generally less upside the more cylinders and larger displacement you have, because the engine is sucking down more fuel just turning over (in the absence of cylinder deactivation). The heavier and less aerodynamic the vehicle, the less upside--the engine has to work harder--but generally a vehicle traveling at constant highway velocities is using only a small fraction of its peak power output.

Finally, you're connected to the internet and have access to search engines. Go to fueleconomy.gov and read about how the EPA conducts its tests, understand if you can why the test averages cannot encapsulate every situation in a single number, and read about the factors and steps that will either markedly increase or markedly decrease your mileage compared to the single AVERAGE that gets published.

But on top of all of this ... why does the base model automatic get better EPA MPG than the sport automatic, while the base manual and sport manual do not differ in EPA MPG?!!!????