Purchased the 06 Tucson V6 in Feb 07 and to date have never gotten above 14.6 MPG; 4WD is hardly used. Anyone know how to get higher MPG?

 

Where do you drive most (city or highway; hills or flat)?
How do you drive (easy or lead foot)?
How are you estimating your mileage? With the travel computer or are you doing the math?

I'm going to assume you have a V6. I also have a 2006 V6 but a FWD which is slightly lighter. I drive it fairly easy and do about 80% highway driving. I get about 21-22 mpg on average. When I do more city driving I get about 18.

What I do to calculate the mileage is to reset both the trip odometer and the MPG calculator to zero every time I fill up (and I always fill the tank until the pump shuts off). Then I divide the miles driven since last fillup by the amount of fuel used to fill it again to determine the MPG. It's usually within half an MPG of what the trip computer calculates for the MPG.

 

My 06 Tucson is a 4WD V6. I calculate the MPG the same way you do. Most of my driving is local city with an easy foot. Would be happy if I got 18 MPG!

 

I think 14.6 is a little low but not overly. My wifes Chrysler Voyager (short wheelbase, 4-cyl) does 90% city driving with her and my 3 kids in tow and it only gets about 14-15 mpg on average. However, I would think even a 4WD Tucson would get about 16 in the city. Is your city hilly and/or do you carry around alot of passengers/cargo?

 

That doesn't sound odd to me at all. We have an '05 Tucson with about 10,000 miles (the vehicle only goes about 3k per year) that has done at best 18 MPG and at worst 14 MPG. It averages somewhere around 15.5-16 with 50/50 city/highway driving. It is outdone by all three of our other vehicles, an '03 Santa Fe (avgs about 20-21 on the same engine), an '04 Dodge Stratus (avgs 24-25), and even our beater '92 Plymouth Voyager with 220,000 miles (avgs 19-20). Multiple dealers insist that "they're all like that" and won't even touch it to try and help. It's downright disgusting. In light of this problem, I ran an oil analysis on the last used motor oil and the oil was pretty well beat up- sheared out of grade and many wear metals were way too high, especially considering the oil was only 1200 miles old. Again, dealer said there was nothing they could do unless the engine outright failed or consumed oil. I don't plan to wait for it to do that.

With gas prices going up, Hyundai telling us to sit on a tack and turn, and the questionable oil analysis results; we are going to trade this thing off while we can still get something for it. We feel lied to and deceived by Hyundai.