Fuel economy in the midst of a pandemic

At first, there was no traffic and my mileage jumped up. The minivan at work jumped from 13 MPG average to 22 MPG average. At first my mileage in the SportWagen jumped up too, but now it is crashing hard.

I'm an essential worker, and my vehicle is my office. The past several weeks it has been over 90F with high humidity. This past week it has been close to 100 with high humidity. Now, I'm letting the car idle with the a/c on while I do my paperwork at each stop, and what I think is the biggest killer, lunch. I can't go into a restaurant for lunch as the dining rooms are closed, so I go through the drive thru, get my lunch, then park in the parking lot with the a/c running for 30 minutes while I eat my lunch. I'm down to the low 30's for a tank in the SportWagen TDI. Even with the extended idling my cost per mile is still a very agreeable $0.072/mile because of the low fuel prices.

What's everyone else's observations?

 

Here’s my observations, while in retirement. I see the layerings of tree leaves blowing in a cool light wind, as I look up, while laying on the cool grassy ground. No need of A/C.
Yeah, retire early, don’t work 45 years like I did. Retire in Washington state.... not far to the south.

 

Between an early February trip and a couple of weeks ago, I think I put more more miles on bikes than my car. During that period, 62.8 actual mpg.

 

Directly in the middle of the hard lockdown back in March and April, the MPG zoomed way up in my truck, as passing through large metros such as Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas were a breeze. I’d say that traffic is back pretty close to where it was pre-pandemic now, but my company seems to be doing right by us and avoiding larger metros where it can, so I have managed to maintain about 10% higher numbers compared to before. Also helping is the fact that I have had a lot of significantly lighter loads of late, which might just be luck, or might reflect shifting freight during this time - I really don’t know.

I don’t drive my car enough to really discern a difference in mileage there, and almost all of those miles are inter-urban freeway miles anyway.