Garmin ecoRoute first observations

Some first observations of ecoRoute:

It's a pretty full featured fuel mileage calculator where you input your vehicle's fuel mileage (city/highway), type of fuel (unleaded/diesel/etc), price and other parameters. The fuel price can either be manually entered or downloaded via MSN Direct's fuel prices. If you're using the MSN data, only the price of the lowest grade fuel is used. If you use mid-grade or premium fuel you'll need to enter those fuel prices manually. One of the trip computer's data fields (bottom left which previously displayed Total Time) has now been changed to show Overall Fuel Cost.

Other features include a Driving Challenge game where you try and get as close to a score of 100 points which are calculated using various parameters of the way you drive like acceleration, deceleration, & speed.

As far as calculating routes using ecoRoute, there is now a Less Fuel option in the Route Preferences. I'm assuming this uses the various parameters you've entered in the ecoRoute settings to optimize your route.

Looks pretty interesting...