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Don’t Drive Angry! How To Get More Miles Out Of Your Hybrid. |
3 Comments |
| By Rob (Beo) in Conservation, Green Living, Hybrids | December 31, 2006 | ||
Ever seen Groundhog Day with Bill Murray? In one of my favorite scenes of all time, Murray is berating his pilfered buddy, Puxatony Phil (a groundhog) for his apparent lack of skill in driving. Looking back on my first year driving a hybrid I thought I would again pass on some tips I have learned on increasing my fuel economy-tips that have allowed me to average over 70mpg during the summer and about 60mpg in the cold winter in my Honda Insight.
Don’t Drive Angry: Find a speed and stick to it. Accelerate steadily, about 50% throttle and try to shift around 2500-3000 rpms.
Slow Down: This should be self evident-but keeping highway speeds under 70 is good for about 5-10% depending on how fast you used to drive. Wind resistance becomes the largest source of economy loss after about 60mph and goes up exponentially every 10mph thereafter. Slow down… you’ll get there!
Draft: No not like Nascar, you’ll kill yourself. But by finding a large vehicle (semi’s are best) and staying about 7 car lengths back I have seen increases as high as 25% by staying in their wake of moving air. Using just this tactic I got 84mpg in a 200 mile trip to Chicago.
Synthetic Oil: I got at least a 5% boost switching to fully synthetic oil-and the gains will be even higher in the winter.
Coast: As soon as you see a light turn red take your foot off the gas and start coasting. Most hybrids will stop injecting any fuel at this point, and any car will drop to a very low duty cycle on the fuel injectors.
Tire Pressure: Ensure you are running in the recommended range-and I run at the highest recommended during the summer. Again good for 5% easy.
These have worked the best for me, another great resource is here. If every car in America got only 1mpg more we would save twice the oil in the ANWR every year, and each of us can do that with the car we have now. I took a major leap switching from my Evo 8 to an Insight-jumping about 45mpg and saving about 10 tons of CO2. In a better example, using the tactics above we have raised the efficiency of our Subaru Forester to 10% above EPA estimates and routinely get 29-30 mpg in mixed driving, and 32 on pure highway. That is better than most small AWD SUV hybrids. Not too shabby and another reason we love our Sube.
Can you commit to 1mpg better in the New Year?
Be the Change!
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Martin Alak said,
I read a great book when I was younger on how to get better gas mileage, it was written in the 1970s, and I routinely got 40mpg+ highway miles on nearly every car I’ve owned in the last 20 years.
Now I walk or ride my bike to work no because I need to, but because I’ve grown really tired of driving unnecessarily. If I don’t need to actually haul something (e.g. home from the store) why waste all that energy? And trips can be planned so as to maximize what is transported to miles travelled.
Now… how can I decrease my consumption further? Unless I decrease my consumption by about 798,245,153% I just don’t feel like I can make a difference.
Stubby said,
* Keep your car in good tune. Bad pugs or old oil reduces mileage. Use a multi-vis oil or a synthetic, whatever is approved for your engine.
* Get a high-efficiency air filter like K&N. Their models are reusable (it’s an oil-coated filter that you clean) and the increased air flow improves mileage.
Andrew said,
I must say, that scene is perhaps the funniest part of the movie.
Don’t drive angry! Never drive angry!