My car is amazing, though it shouldn’t be

I drive a 2018 Toyota Camry, the bare-bones, four-cylinder model, no extras, straight off the lot. I bought it new, paid $19,000 cash. It has 72,000 miles on it now. It’s one of the most ordinary people’s cars in America. The sticker on the window promised I’d get 28 mph city, 36 mph highway.

What’s so amazing about this very average car?

Thursday morning I drove from Houston to Conroe. The dashboard computer said …

I averaged 66.2 miles per gallon. That’s for the whole trip. I love this car!

Ken snapped this pic of his incredible mileage.Photo by Ken Hoffman

I called my mechanic at Demos Automotive Center in Rice Village. I asked, is it normal, even possible, for a car to get 66.2 miles per gallon?

The mechanic said, “It’s possible but you’d have to have the right circumstances, like weather and road conditions. You’d have to deaccelerate when you’re going downhill. That’s the most important thing. There are ways of squeezing extra miles out of a gallon of gas, so it’s possible, but very unusual,” he said.

I don’t do anything special. I keep the air conditioner on. I don’t coast down hills. I don’t use cruise control. I use regular unleaded gas. I just climb in and go. I averaged 50 miles per hour going to Conroe and that includes a visit to a McDonald’s drive-through and a mini-traffic jam passing the Galleria.

My car always had gotten extraordinary mileage — usually between 50-55 mpg and often nudging 60 mpg on the highway. I take photos of the dashboard numbers and show them to friends and post them on Twitter. People think I drive a hybrid. I don’t. My car is an off-the-rack, plain ol’ gas vehicle.

My friend Reg “Third Degree” Burns drives a hybrid, a Toyota Prius. He said he gets about 38 mpg on a good day.

Ken's old ride

My gas miser Camry is payback for my previous car. Ten years ago, the former editor of the Houston Chronicle passed away and gave me his eight-cylinder 2002 rich man’s Jaguar that guzzled premium gas and got about 12 miles per gallon. Almost every time I drove it farther than the dry cleaner, the “check engine” light would come on, or it would go into “reduced performance.”

One time it conked out in Columbus and I had it towed to a local garage. Not a fun day.

I was a regular customer at the Jaguar repair shop. As Rodney Dangerfield used to say, “My car was up and down on the lift so often that it had more miles on it vertically than horizontally.

After one year of getting clawed to death by this Jaguar, I sold it to Carmax and bought my Camry. Every time I’m tempted to trade in my car for a new one, I think 60 mpg and take my Camry to the car wash. Good as new.

Better than new. A 2025 Camry hybrid – all new Camrys are hybrids from now on — promises 41 mpg.

Here are the Top 5 cars, 2024 models, and their gas mileage:

1. Toyota Prius (hybrid) – 47-57 mpg combined.
2. Hyundai Elantra – 31-54 mpg combined.
3. Toyota Corolla – 33-50 combined.
4. Honda Accord Hybrid – 32-48 combined.
5. Hyundai Sonata – 27-47 mpg combined.