I made a chart in my mpg speadsheet that shows a moving average of my mpg. The chart runs from my 1st tank in March, 2004 to my most recent tank, at 13,000 miles. I am not a statistician, but the results look pretty impressive....
Wow! your learing to drive the car. As is visable in the spike when you first got it and were trying to get the best mileage and then a "drive it like it's a car" lower mileage then a slow and steady climb to where your "driving it like a Prius" and also it's fully broken in. Nice graph!
It'd be nice to see these from multiple Prius owners, to further establish this as a trend in the form of several graphs with the same data.
Since the moving average smooths out the curve a lot, I thought I'd post tha chart of the actual MPGs also. Most of the really low mpgs are due to uncontrollable factors. I had a cross state trip with 4 adults and baggage on one. Very strong March winds hurt me on a couple of early tankfulls. I believe that in addition to learning how to drive, the car is getting "looser" as it breaks in, and there is always the temperature affect. After next February, I will post a full year graph to see how the temperature might affect the mpgs. If anybody else has a years' worth of mpg data, go ahead and graph it for us please.
What's the difference between this one and the moving one? I mean, how did you get the smooth curve of the moving one?
ok - if you are interested here is the MPG graph data for my UK classic Prius (more than 2 years of data) - not a moving average though - just your plain old average. you can see how the winters have affected my MPGs and the summers have helped to boost them again. cheers
The first graph is a "moving average". It takes the first few numbers and averages them for the first point. then the next few are averaged for the next point. This is what smooths out the curve. A 5 point average takes the average of readings 1 2 3 4 5 for the first point, 2 3 4 5 6 for the second, 3 4 5 6 7 for the third etc.... That is why it's called a "moving" average, the set of numbers used at each time is moving through the entire set. The more numbers used in each set smooths out the curve more. If you have quattro pro, the option for moving average is in analyze under tools. Or you could look it up in help. I don't know if XL has it but it should.
