The difference between strictly going to and from work and adding in going to the kid's school everyday for me is huge. Just going to and from work is 5 miles each way with 3 of that on a single rural road with no stops. I average just shy of 18, mainly because the first 2-3 miles it is running rich then I hit city driving. The defroster (used to clear condensation not normally frost) doesn't get working well until I'm about a mile from work. I frequently forget I put the defroster on in the mornings. When I add in going to and from my kid's school, which is 20 miles each way with 12-13 of those on rural roads with few stops (longest stretch between stops is 3.4 miles) my average goes up to just short of 22. The speeds are about the same. The last 7 or so miles are in city driving. It seems to me the biggest difference is the fact that going to the kid's school the truck has an opportunity to warm up.

 

That is really true with any vehicle NA or Forced Induction. Short-runs kill mileage whether it is a civic or a dump truck. The only exception would probably be a prius or another type of hybrid.

 

That is true, but the point we are making is that the EB runs exceptionally rich until it warms up. To the extent that if you do only short runs, your tail pipe will be very black with soot. Actually, the 5.0 is very similar in that respect.

 

Yep, my drive is about 4 miles so truck never really warms up 3 days a week.

average mpg for me is around 12.5

 

^ sign me up in the same boat. My commute to work is 10 miles (4 city, 6 hwy) . I live in southern Cal, so any store is no more than 2 miles away. I can't bust 15 mpg combined. My recent 4 hour road trip to Vegas was awesome mileage considering the speeds I was going (75-80mph and got 19.4 mpg). So letting them warm up for a while is when they shine.

 

Yeah I am in a different situation where my home is 31 miles from my office and 24 of those miles are I-70. My worst fill-up to date was like 17.3 mpg.... I have only had my truck for a shade under 3 months and have 7300 miles on her!!!! But once my fiance gets done with school I'll be around 1500 miles a month.... Thank GOD! Bought it to drive tho and damn if it doesn't put a smile on my face every time I climb in it...

 

I have a SuperCrew Lariat with EcoBoost and 3.73 gears. I can get 17.5 on a perfect tank (don't punch it, don't stop except for lights, keep below 70). My commute is 51 miles down the mountain and 51 miles back up (about 3000ft going between 5500' to 8600'. I think the gears, altitude and the climb make my mileage what it is. I seem to get 18+ when driving on flat areas (hard to find around here). My Tacoma got 20 but the 3 MPG is worth it for the really nice ride which the Tacoma certainly was not.

 

I've had two Prius's and they were both the same way. They run the gas engine at startup to get the catalytic converter warm and even though they both had mechanisms to speed the warming up (the 2003 had a thermos bottle that it moved the warm engine water into on shutdown and out of on startup and the 2010 has a mechanism to speedup the converter warmup) they both had terrible (if you can call 25mpg that) mileage on short runs.

 

Interesting... Were they better in Stop and Go driving or open road cruising?

What little city driving I do get in (Evansville, IN every other weekend) kills my EB mileage, driving down to the city I get like 21 and when I roll out Monday mornings its usually at 18 to 19 mpg...... but the woman likes riding in the truck.....

 

Both Prius's were better in city driving. The gas engines, while very efficient don't get great mileage when working hard, maybe 30mpg+, but they turn off when stopped. The batteries only take you 1-3 miles fully charged so they are effectively a rubber band (charge down a hill and unwind up a hill) and for torque at low speeds since the gas engines are Atkin's cycle engines which have little torque. On both of mine I got 46MPG driving my difficult up hill, then down hill commute. Get effectively infinity and a fully charged battery going down and get 25-30 going up. Would get better w/o ethanol but hard to get real gas anymore. I assume the F150 would do better with real gas also. The Prius's are down about 10% with ethanol gas.

 

I'm getting about the same mileage. My exhaust stays clean, though, if I use no-ethanol gas consistently.

 

ANOTHER UPDATE!

This thing keeps getting better with age. Right now I have ~8000 on the ODO and I just recently got the following stats (Sorry, cant upload the photo right now):

Total time: 1:42:48
Gal used: 3.3
Trip Distance 78.9 mi
AVG MPG: 23.6

This was on a trip from Riverside Ca to Whittier Ca. It includes roughly 30% city and 70% highway with 5 people in the truck. I did kind of baby it a little in the city and kept the cruise control between 65-70 the whole time. There very mild traffic on the freeway, but fairly constant flow. The weather was about 80°. My truck is 4x2 XLT with 3.55 limited slip rear end. Wheels are FX4 20" with Pirelli ATR tires @ 40 PSI. This truck is very capable of exceeding MPG expectations if driven accordingly.

I just did my second oil change and the AVG MPG over the past 5500 miles was 17.2. This is to be expected because roughly 20% of my trips are about 2 miles in distance on a cold engine. And my tail pipe is very black with soot as expected.

 

Ford explains that the VCT intake and exhaust cams are overlapped at cold start up for some microseconds, allowing extra fuel and air to pass in microseconds to the Catz. This helps heat the catz much quicker lowering over all emissions. The Bosch fuel system micro manages the fuel injection in micro bursts as called on by the ECU for as much as over 320 degrees of crankshaft rotation for each pistons travel. These micro burst injections help mix the fuel better giving 100% , making for extra mileage per gallon. Ford's Todd Rumpsa Fuel Calibration Engineering Supervisor released that information.
Reducing cold start ups helps reduce the smell of gas odor in the oil. Don't think of this dirrect fuel injection system as a constant one time spray per ignition cycle but as several micro bursts at high psi. All this is to reduce carbon build up in the engine also. This is the part of the process that I'm not too sure aftermarket sources know how to adjust with tuners. If you graph your PID's you can get an idea of how the management system adapts constantly. Sometimes changing so rapidly there is a delay in the graph, which the reader compensates for by calibrations.

 

I just got my Screw FX4 and did my first real fill-up. Computer was saying 16, I hand calculated 15. All was city, some minor HWY, and "demonstrating" to some buddies. I'm happy with it so far considering it has the Max trailer package with 3.73s. Going on a long trip soon and will post the results.

 

The fact that you are getting that kind of mileage on California fuel is pretty incredible. They dilute our fuels with so much emmisions crap its pathetic. In a flatter, cooler state with better gas and unloaded you would probably be pushing 25-26mpg easily.