Tonight we drove home about 58 miles in our Mazda 5. Ours has a 2.3L engine with a 4 speed automatic transmission. The car was hauling the four of us and a fair amount of luggage, etc. We took exclusively 2 lane state route highways and had to stop twice for potty breaks. I ran the air conditioning about 10% of the time.
The result (according to our Scangauge II): 40.3 MPG.. Now, I should mention that I drove 52 MPH (or the posted speed limit in towns) the entire way, but I was still pretty happy to break that barrier in a non-hybrid 6-seater.
For those of you who can’t stomach driving below the limit, Dusty drove the same trip (but on a different day and taking a different route including 20 miles of interstate) driving the speed limit and got around 37 MPG.