Decided to drive the G8 to St. George, UT, for our annual family excursion there. Since this is the first real road trip we made in it, I thought I’d make a quick post. First off let me just say this thing is frikken awesome. I…love…this…car. Yeah, there’s faster, better, more capable, and more expensive cars out there but for an essentially factory ride it’s a keeper. At one point on the trip we were climbing a hill and the “slower traffic stay to the right” sign didn’t apply to several dooshcicles that owned the left lane. I came up on a much slower car in the right lane and decided to get past the dooshes and stepped on it. I didn’t look at the speedo until after I started decelerating and saw “99” on the digital speedometer. I have no idea where I peaked, but the real point is that it didn’t feel anything like triple digit speed. My wife (the Nagivator) typically gets jiggy at those kinds of speeds in other cars, but didn’t even look up from her iPad until I pointed out the speedo. She just said “Hmm. Nice NASCAR move.”. Yes. Yes, it was.
It managed to pull off 23.8 mpg average during the trip with an average speed of 69.8. Most of that was cruising at 85 mph (I limit myself to no more than 5 over the posted limit) and there were some stints at 0 mph while I enjoyed Labor Day traffic in SLC. Not stellar gas mileage by any means but, considering what this car can do, I’m ok with it. Might actually pull off 24-25 if I kept it around 65; there was a noticeable drop in computed mpg when I went up to 85.
The only complaint I can make is that it had a little more wind noise than I expected. Not real bad, but probably more than a comparable Caddy. And I only noticed it when I thought about it, and the beast of a head-wind on the way down probably contributed to it.
I only took one picture worth posting here. It’s hard to get the scale of the mesa behind the car, but if you look closely near the top left of the bush in front of the car you can make out a big-a$$ house on the hillside. The old St. George airport was on top of this mesa before they built a new one outside of town. There’s a valley between where I’m parked and the mesa; part of the city is in that valley.
