Hypermiling, or how to save gasoline without changing anything
Hypermiling has been around for almost as long as cars, but it’s only recently gained its name and notoriety. It’s not just one thing, but a set of different methods mainly involving maintenance techniques and driving habits that together can make your car need significantly less gas to do the same job. I eat between a quarter and a half of the gas. Put it in perspective: how would you like your SUV to get thirty mpg, instead of eighteen?
That’s it: get every possible mile out of every tank of gas. It involves a variety of different things: good preventative maintenance, an understanding of where efficiency is lost in your car, and your personal driving habits.
Tips of hypermiling
You’ll quickly discover when you start studying that many of the recommended tips cover common-sense topics that you may have learned from your parents when you first started driving. Others, however, are more esoteric. And there are hundreds of different hypermiling tips to remember. It’s easier if you break this down into about eight different categories: maintenance, minimizing mass, maintaining the most efficient speed, choosing the right equipment, acceleration and braking techniques, coasting, learning to anticipate, and the right type of fuel.
Maintenance is the most critical and basic of the hyperpolishing techniques. Start with the common sense basics: Maintain your car properly, with regular oil and filter changes. But you need to do more than that. You’ll also need to check your tire pressure at least once a week (consider buying a digital pressure gauge to make it easier) and keep it at or just slightly higher than optimal. The suspension must be well maintained. The most amazing thing is that you have to keep your car washed and waxed; On some models, highway driving efficiency differences can be as much as 7% between a dirty car and a clean car due to the increased wind resistance of a dirty car.
Mass minimization should be done at the same time as maintenance. Keep the interior of your car clean and free of anything of any weight. Do the same in your trunk. Never treat your car like a junk storage facility. Every extra pound of unnecessary weight will decrease your mileage.
Maintaining an efficient speed takes some practice, though you may be able to find out what that is from your car manufacturer. For most cars, the best speed is between 45 and 55 miles per hour, although performance cars may have higher ratings. If you don’t have a digital readout that tells you your approximate miles per gallon at every moment you drive (these can be purchased as add-ons for some cars), try to keep your RPMs around 1500.
Choose the right car, if you are preparing to buy a new one. Manual transmission cars are more efficient than automatics (although some of the difference can be made up by depending on cruise control when possible), and cars with digital MPG readouts are a real godsend. Hybrids, of course, are the best option overall, but not the only option.
Slow acceleration and using the car’s own weight for braking rather than the brakes themselves is probably the most intensive skill to learn in hypermiling. This takes a lot of practice and learning new habits: keep your foot off the brake as much as possible, accelerate slowly, and watch what’s going on in front of you for as much warning as possible to slow down; this prevents you from using the brakes too much. Every time you use the brakes, you are wasting energy and gas.
Coasting is mostly a hybrid technique, where you accelerate to a set level and then let the engine die, slowing back down to a set speed before accelerating again. Pulse-and-glide is also part of this technique.
Learning to anticipate what will happen in front of you will improve all your other techniques. This means you need to watch drivers next to you, merging and as far forward as possible. Again, this is a technique that takes practice, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to use all other hyper-polishing techniques more effectively. Look back too; Keep a log in your glove box recording every time you get gas, how much you got, and how many miles you drove. Over time, this will help you judge how well your hypermiling is going.
Lastly, use the right type of fuel: in most cases, the least important of your driving problems. Unless it says otherwise on the inside of the gas cap, always use regular gasoline. You also don’t have to go to a station with cleaning additives, as long as you do a gas treat every 1500 miles.
secondary benefits
Obviously, hypermiling saves gasoline. But done correctly, there are other advantages:
- Hypermiling can make you a safer and more aware driver. Most drivers are not fully aware of all the road activity around them, which is dangerous. However, to do this correctly, you need to know the spaces in front of you, the upcoming stops, and the driving patterns of others. This increased awareness adds to your safety. In addition, it also involves finding a specific target speed, where you get optimal mpg. This speed is usually set to somewhere between 45 and 55 miles per hour, forcing you to slow down to a safer speed than most people usually drive.
- Take better care of your car. A hypermiler typically keeps your car in tip-top condition: proper tire inflation and regular rotation, regular oil changes and tune-ups, and proper general maintenance. Also, because you use the brakes minimally when you hypermile, your brakes will last longer and there will be less overall stress on your engine.
- By changing the patterns of all drivers, you can improve overall traffic efficiency. Efficiency experts have examined traffic patterns and found that most bottlenecks and problems occur when fast-moving traffic suddenly meets slower traffic. By maintaining consistent speeds, you can also help break traffic jams, improving not only your own fuel economy and safety, but that of everyone else on the road as well.
As you can see, investing the time to learn these techniques can save you gas and make your life safer. The response to the gas crisis, in a word: hypermiling.
