Everyone should know how many miles per gallon their car gets, but many people do not. I didn’t even know my car’s MPG, until today when I calculated it out.

How to Find Your Official Gas Mileage

If you want the quickly know your approximate mpg, the good ol’ U.S. government has set up this website where you can look up your car’s gas mileage or compare miles per gallon for different cars. And just recently, the EPA has changed how it calculates MPG to more accurately depict real world driving conditions.

According to their site, my car gets 24 miles per gallon (highway and city gas mileage combined). Based on an average gas cost of $3.01 per gallon and average annual driving of 15,000 miles, that works out to a whopping $1883 each year just spent on gas! That’s not even counting car repair costs, rotating tires, or oil cost.

How to Find Out Your Own MPG

To find out your car’s actual gas mileage, you just need to do some simple mathematics.

1. Fill up your car with gas, and reset your odometer to zero.
2. Drive like normal.
3. Next time you need gas, pull up to the gas station and write down how many miles you’ve driven since you last filled up.
4. Fill up your car, and write down how many gallons o’ gasoline it took.
5. To find your car’s MPG, divide your miles driven by gallons of gas. Voila!

Using this method, I divided my miles driven by gallons of gas (426.8 / 14.454) to get my actual gas mileage ( 29.5 mpg! ). Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.

Update: (June 2010) Sadly, I wrecked my old car about a month ago in a weak little accident. But, my new car (a Toyota Yaris), gets over 40 miles to the gallon! Hot diggity dog!

How many miles per gallon does YOUR car get?

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