Beginning Hypermiler

With the increase of gasoline prices, I saw a story on some portal somewhere a couple of weeks ago about hypermiling. Just by turning off my engine at a red light and making a conscious effort to keep my freeway speed below 70 (which isn’t too hard to do on the Nimitz Freeway during rush hour, I was able to drive a 1994 1.9l Ford Escort almost 460 miles with just over 12.5 gallons of gas, for a mpg of around 37. Usually I go about 375 miles, and get nervous at 400. I do find it odd that the fuel capacity specification is only for 11.9 gallons. Sometime when I’ feeling a bit braver, I’ll run the tank down to zero and push it to a station and fill the tank. Right now, the fuel gauge reads just under a half tank, and 300 miles driven.

In a semi-related story, I took my mother-in-law to the airport last night in her car. She has a fancy fuel-use display built in. I’d love to get my own ScanGaugeII to monitor fuel use, but it won’t work on my old car.

Anyway, I was using it to check various fuel-economy increasing events. You know, like drafting a big rig. I found that in the automatic, it was too difficult to get a good enough reading over a long enough period of time. Also, the meter topped out at 70mpg when coasting. One interesting thing that I found was that going around a curve behind a big rig had no benefit to driving not behind a big rig. One thing I wanted to test was whether there would be any benefit to being the second or third car behind a big rig vs being in the same spot without any other cars between.

Although I didn’t get enough testing time, I can say that driving home in her car after dropping off my mother-in-law was probably one of the happiest times I’ve had in her car.

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