Fuel Efficiency Adviser Review

How much information do you get from your car? I'll admit I'm kinda fortunate with my 1996 Mercury Grand Marquis that I have ford's digital dash. Ford allowed the driver to see what the fuel economy both average and instant w/ this digital dash. At the same time, it's limiting to the point where it is frustrating. Many cars display the tachometer, some display voltage and other temperatures besides water temperature. Linear-Logic seems to have a solution to the lack of information for the tech driven drivers. The unit is called ScanGaugeII or the one I'm specifically talking about is called the Fuel Efficiency Adviser. From what I can tell, it's the same unit with a different sticker on the front.

Design: When looking at it from the outside it isn't a pretty device. It's black with a changeable color backlit display. Dimensions are about 5" X 1" X 1.5" small but it can be hard to find a place to mount if your gear is located just above the steering column. It has a 6' black cable, which looks like a network cable on one end and an OBDII port connector on the other.

Utility: The guts of the Fuel Efficiency Adviser are where this product becomes useful. Once attached to the car it's very simple to be interfaced. Just turn the car to the on position and wait usually 5-10 seconds and it's connected. The Fuel Efficiency Adviser's main screen shows Primary information, Gauges, and Trip. Primary information is mainly information for fuel efficiency like Current Trip Cost, Total cost so far today, Instant MPG, and average MPG. Its good information, but I prefer more gauges. The Gauges are cool because it gives a possible of 16 built in gauges to look at including the ones from primary. These gauges include RPM, intake temperature, water temperature, battery voltage, engine load, etc... Trip is a useful trip computer when you want to look back at stats pertaining to you current trip, so far today, yesterday and tank. Information you can get includes max speed, max RPM, average speed, Driving time, distance, and amount of fuel remaining to name a few. For the current version of Fuel Efficiency Adviser, it also has the program called X-gauges, which allows a user to program in different gauges that are not a part of the default 16. Depending on how many sensors you have on your car the information from these gauges can be vast or limited.

The Fuel Efficiency Adviser also allows a user to check error codes on their vehicle. I didn't have a check engine light on so I couldn't test this feature.

So what is my overall opinion of this car computer? In general I believe it's a very useful tool for both the enthusiast along with those who hyper-mile. It gives information that is usually hidden from the driver but can be very useful to the driver if they know how to apply it. It does transfer from one car to another easily but when it comes to measuring fuel efficiency when it is going from car to car it ends up lacking. From what I can tell, it uses a calibration reading based off tank fill ups and estimated fuel used. Well if it was transferred to another car and used, it accounts that information for the original car and when a fill up is done throws off the MPG and averages for fuel consumption immensely.

If your using it for one car it's very good at being calibrated for fuel consumption and estimating MPG, but fuel consummation estimation by using it on multiple cars doesn't work very well even if it is adjusted for engine size and tank size.

Overall, I would give the Fuel Efficiency Adviser 4.5 out of 5. It's well worth the $150 price tag and can be usable across multiple cars for gauges if you’re not worried about what your MPG and Fuel usage are.