mileage

When I got back to the States after my vacation in diesel-clogged Buenos Aires, I had a Ford Escape Hybrid waiting for me to test drive. I don’t think I’ve even been so happy to see a low-emissions vehicle in my life.

Before we get to the mpg, a note on space: The Escape fit all of our suitcases, camera bags, backpacks, and whatever else in the back seat and cargo area, with plenty of space for a regular-sized driver (me) and a six-foot-plus passenger. It was far less crammed than the airline seats we had just happily left, and we had satellite radio.

When the Escape is started, the gasoline engine comes on, so there is an audible cue to let the driver know when to stop turning the key. In case that’s still too quiet for you, there’s the little green car-shaped light with a double-ended arrow under it in the dashboard to let you know the vehicle is ready to go. (This comes in handy when stopped at very long red lights and the gas engine drops out. The electric motor is silent, but ready to do your bidding at the green light.)

The home screen of the display has a little map, radio information, and an mpg meter. For more detailed mileage information, you can call up the HEV screen, which shows a diagram of the engine, electric motor, the battery, and the front wheels. A green outline shows which elements are in play at any time, and the status, i.e., “Idle with Charging,” is spelled out at the bottom of the screen.

The Escape doesn’t have the pep of the Mini I tested a few weeks ago, but I did take it on a variety of roads — surface streets, interstates, and state roads. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get my average fuel economy to budge from 30 mpg. Wait — I did get it to 29.9 mpg while I was passing a string of trucks. This is less than the EPA combined rating of 32 mpg, but still good for an SUV. The EPA also gives it an 8 out of 10 emissions rating.

That kind of mileage and low emissions come at a price, though: the Ford Escape Hybrid starts at $29,305. Hybrids are still hard to find on the lot, as they are expensive to build and popular to buy, so price breaks and dealer incentives are going to be equally as scarce for the Escape hybrid. But if you can find and afford it, the Ford Escape hybrid is a great SUV.

Yet another addition has been made to the online arsenal of tools for the savvy driver: CostToDrive.com. This easy-to-use web app asks for your start point, end point, and year, make, and model of the car you’ll be driving. It can then spit out the amount you’ll pay to fuel your rig for that trip.

I decided to give the calculator a test run, as I just took a drive to Auburn, Washington, for work, and I know what I spent on gas for that little adventure. The first thing I found was that if your car is older than 1999, you won’t find it in the drop-down menu.

Cost to Drive couldn’t find my little red truck in the system, so I entered it free-form style, including the MPG and size of the tank.  It told me I could expect to spend $25.75 on that trip, which was just about right. But I could have figured that out in my head using the information it had me type in.

The builders of the site call the process “galculating,” which is what I did while stuck in traffic on Interstate 5 yesterday. “If I sit here for x number of minutes burning y gallons of gas, how much time and money am I losing?” There’s nothing like a traffic jam to make word problems seem fun.

Cost to Drive may help you decide if a trip is worth it, or it may help you compare the cost of gas to the cost of a train ticket, but the math is pretty easy. I firmly believe you could figure this stuff out without a dedicated web site, but if your brain is having a difficult day, then Cost to Drive may help.

The NY Times reported last weekend on a dozen autos you might not expect to get such great gas mileage. Among their picks was a Corvette, which I can tell you first-hand gets better gas mileage than you’d expect, at 26 mpg on the highway — if you drive it reasonably and responsibly. But who does that in a Corvette?

Here’s the Times’s list with combined miles per gallon, but you’ll want to read the whole list on the newspaper’s Web site. Reporter Lawrence Ulrich includes everything from tiny econoboxes to full-size SUVs and pickups. He purposefully left out the obvious, like the Prius and Honda Civic, to focus on overlooked models in broad categories.

• Toyota Camry Hybrid, 34 mpg
• Volkswagen Jetta TDI, 33 mpg
• Mini Cooper, 29 mpg
• Nissan Versa, 27 mpg
• Honda Accord coupe, 24 mpg
• Toyota RAV-4, 24 mpg
• Mazda 5, 23 mpg
• BMW 328i, 22 mpg
• Toyota Tacoma, 21 mpg
• Chevy Corvette, 19 mpg
• Ford Flex, 19 mpg
• Mercedes-Benz GL320 Bluetec, 19 mpg