Nice detective work! What year is your Patriot? How many miles?
We've done the minivan thing... I don't recommend it.
Why don't you recommend it?
Terrible MPG? I just looked up honda odyssey MPG's and they are about what we get in ours, my wife rarely drives further than a mile or two at a time so 95% of her miles are done with a cold engine, and gets ~17mpg, when I was driving it commuting - Stop and go traffic I got about 22mpg, and the last long distance trip we got 27mpg, almost 28mpg, and that's me driving 85-90mph would have gotten better if I was driving closer to 75mph. I would bet the odyssey gets very similar milage.
Cute kids!
The redhead will be a heart-breaker in another dozen years!
Thanks, that picture is super old now, at least 3 years. This is a more recent picture from a few weeks ago:Cute kids!
EPA rating
Those are for fwd. I have gotten about the same estimate on the epa for both the stick shift patriot and cvt.
I have a 2011 flex, don't know if that has any bearing on anything. My wife does worst case possible driving, slightly hilly area, cold engine with no chance to warm up, short 1-3 miles MAX for most of her driving. and her average is 17.5mpg, once I take it into pretty heavy stop and go, like I said, I get 22 pretty easily. and 26-27 highway going 75-85mph.
On most Chrysler products I've been well able to exceed the EPA estimate. I had a number of company GM products and found the EPA estimates about right or a tad optimistic. That said, I worked those GMs pretty hard. Wifey does mostly highway driving with Her 2.0 FWD 5-spd and She is pretty much in the l0w-to-mid 30s MPG -- thats way over the EPA. I dare say She's never been under the EPA estimate.
well, of the ones we've owned/borrowed/rented. They didn't offer any more room than our flex, some of them offered less, the 3rd row in most were a pain to access, especially if you have car seats back there, they didn't get (at least the ones we drove) any better fuel economy than our flex, the ride quality was inferior. But mostly for us, it was the ease of getting kids in and out, and as an adult being able to use that 3rd row. Most make access to that 2nd row a priority and the third row can go stuff themselves. Now I will admit I haven't driven the newest of the new, so maybe things have changed, but a number of the ones I've driven range from 2005~2015.
Yeah I have noticed getting into the 3rd row for a car seat or anything else could be a pain in some of the minivans I've seen. I hate how they are forcing you to walk through the center area between the 2 second row seats. I like it when the seat just folds forward for people to get access to the back. I could argue differently about cargo room and passenger volume room. mpg should be slightly better than the ford flex, neither of them are that good mpg in my opinion. The plan is to get a minivan or something of that size and then replace the patriot with a wrangler unlimited (if they weren't so damn expensive used). I refuse to spend more than 20k on any vehicle.
