HYBRID cars’ appeal isn’t limited to fuel economy or the green halo they supposedly convey to their owners. Many of these cars, like the Toyota Prius and Ford Fusion Hybrid, have dashboard monitors that give an engine’s-eye view of how efficiently the trip is going — an inducement to improve one’s eco-driving skills.
Similarly detailed information is usually not provided by the trip computers of conventional cars, an omission that a few companies are hoping to exploit with aftermarket add-on devices.
One of these, the Fuel Efficiency Adviser (fuelefficiencycenters.com), measures nearly every aspect of your car’s fuel use. You plug the $160 device into the OBD-II diagnostic port of your car (usually under the dashboard, near the steering column) and enter information about the engine, the size of the fuel tank and the price per gallon at the last fill-up. The device displays current and average miles per gallon and the actual cost of each trip.
The readout on the black box, which is about the size of a cellphone, shows how far you can go on the remaining fuel, your maximum and average speeds and a dozen other stats you may never need, like the engine’s highest r.p.m. and the maximum temperature of the coolant.
The gadget provides a real-time display of how much money you’d save by avoiding abrupt stops and starts and other aggressive moves.
Other devices promoted as offering mileage monitoring include Drive Green, Save Gas ($300), which its seller, PLX Devices (plxkiwi.com), describes as combining trip data with eco-driving lessons, and the DashDyno SPD by Auterra (auterraweb.com), which says its $329 gadget collects data including horsepower and torque readings as well as instant m.p.g. and diagnostics tools.