Seriously I have no idea what the difference in terms of mileage are between the auto and manual GT's.... I know I'm getting between 20 - 22 MPG w/ a mix of city/highway + air conditioning - no complaints.
Inflate your tires to 32-34 psi.
Remove all the extra weight in your car, like junk in the trunk and huge sub woofer enclosures.
Make the car more aerodynamic.
Drive with the windows all the way up.
Drive with the top up on convertibles.
Close any sun roofs, etc.
Remove anything loose on the outside like those "Bras", I dont know what they call them now.
Maybe even tape up the gaps between body panels and around the lights.
Use cruise control to drive at a steady rate.
Draft behind big trucks on the highway.
Hell, even carpool. That way your not driving half the time.
One thing that lots of people dont know is that an engines peak efficiency is at WOT. Im not going to go into the reason right now but its actually very simple. unfortunately, there are too many other factors involved and we cant take full advantage of this.
My best advice would be to do some research about your car and its fuel delivery system and learn about some of the small aspects of it that you can take advantage of to get you the best mileage. I say this because driving technique alone is a huge fuel efficiency potential (as opposed to just having the right setup).
Im currently a student at the Vehicle Research Institute at WWU and I get the pleasure of learning some neat things that people dont usually think about. I can tell you that the two largest contributors to fuel efficiency are Drag (aerodynamic and frictional) and Weight. Right behind those is driving technique.
One of my instructors at the VRI built a lightweight, aerodynamic car with a 4 cylinder diesel that gets 74 MPG with an average driver. With him driving it averages 114 MPG. That 40 MPG difference is due only to the way HE drives and exploits every little efficiency variable.
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89' GT Ragtop.
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Ford Racing "C" springs
SLP Loudmouths
Summit o/r x-pipe
BBK equal length headers
BBK strut tower brace
Chipped by DynoSources
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A few other things...
"Money" mentioned auto vs. manual and I wanted to mention a few things in case people want to know but dont already.
-The average car engine loses roughly 60% of its energy to heat alone.
-Another ~15-20% is lost in a manual drivetrain, and ~22-24% is lost in an aoutomatic drivetrain.
-When you consider aerodynamics and rolling resistance the final figure is a loss of ~80% of the total produced energy.
This means that we only productively use about 20% of the total amount of energy that our engines produce. To give you all an idea of how much this is, that would mean that an average car that puts out 200 RWHP is actually producing about 1000 HP of equivalent energy in the engine.
This is part of the reason that I want a turbo
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89' GT Ragtop.
-==-
Ford Racing "C" springs
SLP Loudmouths
Summit o/r x-pipe
BBK equal length headers
BBK strut tower brace
Chipped by DynoSources
-==-
if you worry about fuel sell your stang and buy a bike,, a bought my stang and fuel was the last thing i thought about!!, put your foot down and drive baby!!!!
if you worry about fuel sell your stang and buy a bike,, a bought my stang and fuel was the last thing i thought about!!, put your foot down and drive baby!!!!
i agree stangs are meant to be driven... driven hard... gas is a issue so but a cheap @$$ 4 banger and gut it out to get to work and back... im going to.. prob get a lil hatchback and gut it out
Accelerate slowly
avoid slowing down (if possible and legal)
keep speeds 5mph below speed limit. (instead of 10 over)
keep RPM at around 1200 - 1700.
get 2.73 gears for highway cruising.
put a 205/60 R 16 michelin energy tire on.
Did a highway drive (222 miles round trip) yesterday averaging the car (2003GT manual with no special additions) at 75 MPH (which is the speedlimit here). Parts of the route were slower speeds (62 MPH speedlimit) but 85% to 90% of the trip got me on the 75 MPH. Got it to 24.65 MPG. All I really did was set the cruise control and let it roll.
Prior to that I had a semi long drive (70 miles round trip) and a bit of city driving, and I do try to keep a firm hold on the lead-foot syndrome (which seems to work out for me most of the time), but somehow it's consumption dropped down on that drive to 16.02 MPG
Quote:
if you worry about fuel sell your stang and buy a bike,, a bought my stang and fuel was the last thing i thought about!!, put your foot down and drive baby!!!!
Fuel has been one of the concerns when I bought this car actually. With current prices here (Europe), one would better take fuel into account to make sure it's affordable. Last I checked there's about a 3 to 4 dollar per gallon difference between the US and the EU prices. So flooring it and emtying the tank rapidly is fun... until you start to notice how little the amount of money is that you're left with.
Just recently I heard about a cool sensor/valve on most engines called the "overrun cutoff valve" that shuts off fuel to the engine when the throttle is closed and the rpms are above a certain value (deceleration/compression braking condition). It makes perfect sense so I dont know why I didnt realize it before.
I read somewhere that this "certain" rpm in the fox mustangs is about 1800.
Anyway, now that im consious of this I have tried to keep the rpms abouve 1800 and off the throttle as much as humanly possible to see if it helps, and the last tank i went through got me an average of about 20 mpg (im in the city right now and I have been getting about 16 mpg). So there was an increase, at least with the last tank.
Ill let you know how this tank goes, but like I said earlier, it pays to know you car.
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89' GT Ragtop.
-==-
Ford Racing "C" springs
SLP Loudmouths
Summit o/r x-pipe
BBK equal length headers
BBK strut tower brace
Chipped by DynoSources
-==-
In the real world, I've found that keeping the tires up to pressure or a couple of pounds more is a big help. Conservative driving, minimizing complete stops and then starts, and using the cruise control helps a lot! My best mpg on a 60mph cruise was 27. This was almost exclusively highway driving on a level highway with cruise set for 60mph. Normally in mixed driving I'll get 20 to 24 mpg. By the way, because of lock up torque converters and a different od gear, autos and manuals get about the same mpg.:thumbsup
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2002 Mustang GT Convertible, auto, Mineral Grey, Dark Charcoal leather, Bullitt rims.
2007 Ford F150 SuperCab FX4, Dark Shadow Grey/Black cloth, 5.4 FFV.
What can I do to get more MPG? 
