Back at the beginning of 2005 I bought a ‘98 F-150 to stomp around in the oil patch with. Being used with no maintenance history, I wasn’t sure what I was up against, especially when the check-engine light illuminated on the drive home from the dealership.

Someone once told me that you can tell a lot about your vehicles health from the mileage it gets, so I figured I’d keep track of this data. Every time I filled up the tank, I kept the receipt and wrote the overall mileage as well as the trip mileage right on the receipt. After a few months of collecting receipts in the glove box, I collected the receipts and logged them in a spreadsheet.

Well tonight I finally started to analyze my data. I have close to 100 data points to use as a basis for my analysis which should be more than adequate.

I had hoped to see a slight increase in mileage over time as I keep up the maintenance, change the oil every 4,000 miles, and clean the plugs and injectors on a routine schedule. All of which had obviously not been done by the previous owner.

Back at the end of March of this year, I wrote a post on how slowing down will save money, and I decided to put that concept to work. Since then I’ve tried to keep from going zero to warp-speed when that light turns green.

I was a bit miffed at the results of my study. From my data I really can’t draw any solid conclusions about the health of my truck, other than the fact that, even with over 100 data points, the frequency of the sample is not enough to fit a smooth curve to.

However, if you put a trendline to the data, it does show that gradually over time, my mileage is getting better, which could be a by-product not sprinting off the line.

So my study was a bit anti-climactic.

Another interesting analysis that came of my exercise is the variation of gas prices over time. You can plainly see the affect of Hurricane Katrina back in the Fall of ‘05, as well as the peak driving season over this past summer.

After showing my wife the results of my study, I got the same response I usually do:

“You are sooo engineer.”

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