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My uncle swore his 2016 truck got 28 mpg on a road trip, and I wasted a whole weekend trying to figure out why that number was bogus
My uncle Gary drove his 2016 Silverado from Tulsa to Amarillo back in April and posted a screenshot of his dash saying 28.4 mpg average for the trip. I believed it for about a day until I started thinking about how that math could even work, because a full size truck with a V8 doing almost 30 mpg is not a real world number. I asked him to fill up at the same pump before and after, write down the gallons, and divide the miles by hand instead of trusting the dash. Turns out the dash had not been reset from a long downhill stretch he drove two days earlier, so that average was a mix of two totally different drives. When we did the real math it came out to about 19.1 mpg, which is way more believable for that truck. This is the kind of thing I see people share online all the time, screenshots of dash numbers or app readings with no context, and everyone just runs with it. Has anyone else caught a family member or friend passing off a tech readout as proof without checking the actual numbers first?
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gracethomas26d ago
That line about the dash not being reset from a downhill stretch two days earlier is the whole ballgame right there. Did your uncle actually know he never reset it, or did he honestly think that 28.4 was from the Tulsa trip the whole time? Because those are two very different kinds of wrong. I've caught my dad doing the same thing with his truck's trip meter, except he resets it at random times and then acts shocked when the math doesn't line up with what he remembers. The bigger issue is that a dash average can technically be true while still being completely useless as proof of anything, since it just shows whatever stretch of road you happened to leave it running on, and people never mention that part when they post the screenshot.
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