Speed, Distance, Time Left, Petrol Consumption

Average Speed

This is not complicated but it's what I did as I was travelling from A to B on a long bus journey: I set up a spreadsheet to deal with the following.

Although there should have been nothing to worry about, I wanted to be sure that I would make my connection at my destination.

So I wanted to know how fast we were going. There were kilometre posts on the road side for most of the journey and my phone has a stopwatch utility. I found the speed of the bus by combining the distance travelled, one kilometre; and time taken to travel it. I could check our speed whenever I wanted to now!

Then I wanted to know how long it would take us at the last recorded speed to get to our destination B. All I needed to know was the distance to B and then use my knowledge of speed to estimate the time remaining. I could find the distance to B every now and again from the sign posts on the road that told us!

That's all I really needed to know but then I enhanced my spreadsheet by adding these calculations too:

Time to cover one kilometre:

In minutes
In seconds

I considered creating a table to record all of the speeds I found together with distances remaining etc but decided that was academic!

Finally, this spreadsheet can cope with kilometres or miles ... and can convert from one to the other.

Petrol Consumption

As I bought a new car recently I decided I would keep a record of all of the petrol I buy for it. I have also kept a record of the kilometres driven. I record the litres of petrol bought, odometer reading at the time I bought the petrol, cost of petrol, type of petrol: my car can use either E20 or gasohol 91 petrol.

My very simple spreadsheet shows all of the above data and the calculation of kilometres driven per litre of petrol and average cost per litre.

At this stage there are very few data points and the consumption averages have yet to settle down.

Duncan Williamson