I meant to mention this yesterday, as it actually happened then, but neck pain and work pain conspired to distract me from the internets for most of the day.

With a few relatively minor tweaks to my driving style (drive about five mph slower than my norm, set the cruise and leave it alone), I managed to wring 401 miles out of my last tank of gas in the Matrix, which worked out to 35.8 miles-per-gallon. That’s on the (very) high end of the dealer-advertised mileage for the model, which I think everyone knows is usually a wistful fiction, so I’m pretty happy.

Especially since I did at least forty of miles of that down in the middle of a sweltering stopsign-every-other-block residential area, with the air conditioner running. In short — it means I could get it even higher.

I wish the car had one of those “this is what your MPG is *right now*” readouts — it’d be like playing a video game. :)