Hello All,

Is the mileage gauge trustworthy or bad guesstimate?
I just bought my dream truck. 2006 Dodge 2500 4x4 4dr LWB.

 

congratulation on your purchase

if you talking about the overhead "not in your wildest dreams"

most are off by 1-3 mpg

hand calculate

 

Agree with Larry.

Many congrats on your purchase!

 

There are a lot of "it depends" about it.
Mine was off until I went one oversize on the tires now it's less than 1 mpg from hand calculating.
If you do any mods you need to check it to find out the delta. My overhead odo went dead though so I'm hoping when I replace it the MPG is still accurate.

 

thanks guys for the congrats I had been driving gas trucks until now. All Dodge though. The one I just replaced is 95' pickup with 240,000 miles and still starts up like thunder. giving it away to family.

I'll be hand calculating the mileage this weekend. Btw I've heard two different stories about using additives ex. Lucus. It use to help with my gasser but after ethenol became 10% it didn't make a difference.

 

If I can't get Bio I will add about a pint of 2 cycle per fillup, It seems to make it run a little smoother and it makes me feel better about the lifespan of my VP. And in the winter I use amsoil diesel additive. I'm sure where I live my fuel won't gel but it's cheap insurance.

 

I had heard about the adding 2 cycl for every other fill up to help lube the pump. I believe it was to compensate for the ULSD as not all stations have good additives to help counter the uls. I am still learning the tricks to good D-health. Plan to bring my new used truck into tranny shop for flush and looky. I don't want any surprises

 

Congrats on the truck!

Overhead will be off like said above.

I also run Power service (gray bottle) about once a month and also run about 1 qt TCW-3 2 cycle oil from wally world per a full tank of fuel every couple of fill ups.

 

MPG reading will always be off. But you can use it to estimate your mileage after you do a few hand calculations yourself to see where it's at.

Hand calc an easy tank full and a towing tank full, for instance, and see how it compares.

I've pretty much stopped looking at mine. The temperature reading and course is more accurate and interesting.

 

Is the overhead mileage gauge trustworth?...absolutely.

You can trust it to always be way too high.

 

I watch mine and dream

MH3 I'm over in Athens if you ever need anything

 

Thanks Larry appreciate it.

Plan to do the math this weekend. Taking a trip down to Louisiana to give away my old gasser. One less vehicle on my insurance. https://www.dieseltruckresource.com/.../guitarist.gif

I babied my old truck and worked on everything myself so I don't really have the lead foot like lots of diesel drivers. For me with this new diesel it's kind of like being the big guy who knows the power he's got so don't have to display it all the time. Let's see how long the light foot lasts.

 

ill give it 2 days lol!

 

Mine's the opposite... I was running around with the distance to empty being 0 for a short time. I was getting nervous.... needlessly as it turns out that it still had several usable gallons in the tank (at least 2 usable).

Overhead guage = Lie-O-Meter

 

Your MPG gauge will be off but the DTE (distance to empty) is usually bang on.