My better half and me have a 2003 escape limited for her daily driver and she is currently driving roughy 160 km a day and with gas being 1.18 a litre it's getting expensive. What are some things people have done to the escapes for better mileage. When we first bought it the mileage wasn't to great 14l-100km. Since then I have done a basic tune up plugs a couple coils (one failed the other had a crack in it) and went through the vacuume lines found 1 leak and the lines routed wrong. The milage has gone up to around 11.2l-100km, which is around what I expected out of it. But who doesn't want better? I have read that putting a better flowing muffler usually gains 1 or 2 mpg more as well as a Sct programmer (which would help with the terrible shift points also.)

 

If you get 1mpg out of a muffler you're doing great. The sct may get you one more but how long would it take to recoup the price of the programmer in fuel savings?

 

About all you can do it to make sure the mechanics are running well (tuneup), filters are clean, exhaust is free flowing, and tire pressures are regularly maintained.

I had Goodyear Assurance Fuel Max tires on my '02 and the claim that they will improve fuel mileage is true. No great leaps and bounds, but I saw an increase of about 1.5MPG with them. There are several "low rolling resistance" design tires available now so I might consider them when it's time for you to replace yours.

We put the same tires on our Kia and I regularly ran them at 34psi for daily commuting and bumped them to 36psi for long trips. Just had to replace them after 3 years and about 73,000 miles. We weren't seeing the same tread life on the Escape, but we used the Escape for very different purposes and I wasn't really expecting to.

 

Thanks for the tip on the tires, we will need to replace ours next year so I will keep those in mind. The cost of a programmer will probably negate any savings on fuel economy unless I can find a used one for cheap. I guess I will just have to keep playing with it to see what else I can get out of it. Forgot to add I also cleaned the throttle body on it while I did the plugs. I was able to squeeze 22.5 us mpg out of my old 2002 f250 7.3 4x4 so I figure I should be able to get the escape to get that....