Day 47: irrational Hysteria

I was driving the Nissan Versa Note the other day and on the instrument cluster is a countdown miles to empty number was prominently displayed. There were about 225 miles on the tank, all city driving, and the coundown showed about 110 miles left. Seeing this I figured I didn't need gas any time soon as we don't drive very much. After spending about 10 minutes in freeway traffic on my way downtown, the miles remaining dipped to 50 and the gas light came on. This seems awfully premature, but I had only filled the tank once, and it was when it was half full, so I didn't really have a feel about what kind of real world mileage I was getting. I gassed up 10 miles later, with 35 miles left on the meter and 240 miles on the tank. The car took 8 gallons til it clicked off, and I didn't overfill it the previous fill up. That works out to 30 MPG. The Versa Note has a fuel capacity of 10.8 gallons, so I had about 84 miles left for a total real potential range of 325 with city driving. When I restarted the car after the fill up, the range was listed as 364 miles. Clearly, city driving will not get that many miles. At least I know now that the car gets about 30 MPG and I can wait til 300 miles if I've just been doing city driving. My lifetime average with my Fit is 32.3 MPG over 30,000 miles.