I guess I'm a hypermiler as I'll drive the speed limit and am in 5th gear between 40-45mph or around 1500 rpm when driving around town, and drive at thge speed limit on the highways. When the speed limit was 55, my 87 GT used to get around 35 mpg and over 300 miles per tank of gas. At current speed limits I'm down to 31 mpg. I also stay in the right lane to let the "crazies" drive by me at 10-20 mph over the speed limit, usually in an SUV or big pickup truck. I figure that the car was rated at 28 mpg highway, and I'm doing 30+, good for me, but these ethanol blends are killing the mpg on all my cars.

WOT is the biggest waste of fuel the wot people are far far more dangerous than hypermilers ..Hypermiling is not effective in heavy traffic people going reall slow on the expressway are not hypermilers,, they are just cheap or have some problem..the gas wasted in WOT will take 10 miles of very careful driving to return economy of action
The worst drivers I have encountered in my life are often at WOT,,,the WOT drivers seem to tailgate more often and have more accidents the biggest waste of fuel is WOT nothing else comes close .
Most people have not yet realize the problem is not the price of gas in the near future there will not be enough ,,yu may have to wait hours just to fill your tank ,,I remember gas lines
The american public is demanding slower speed limits by thier habits and actions,, GAS is real cheap now 'cheap" but people do not understand this ..It will not take much of a shortage to bring on Gas lines the democrats are drooling to get you in a gas line,so you will drive less Oh you dont remember Gas lines ??? opec and our congress have brought this on before get ready.. oh your laughing ?? Ha Ha wait till you wait 4 hours for gas !! Some stations you could only get 5 gallons a day

quote Originally posted by 86GT3.4DOHC: Drafting doesnt mean riding someones bumper you can be several car lengths back and still get supplemental effects.

That's actually not true

hypermiling is basically impossible on the east coast as you will probably get murdered
some places you just cant do anything at all except coast with the engine on and break more gradual than normal

quote Originally posted by JimEK: That's actually not true

Sure it's true. 4-5 carlengths behind a tractor trailer is safe and you get very measureable benefits.

I've found that one of the best tools for improving economy is a Scangauge - shows you instantaneous mileage, trip mileage, engine load, boost etc. A lot of newer cars have this capability from the factory now.

My daily driver is a 2002 Golf TDI - lifetime average of 51mpg. My personal best is 1001 miles on a tank, worked out to a little over 62mpg. This weekend I drove from Strathroy to Mississauga (200kms) and got 3.4L/100km for the trip - somewhere around 69mpg. This is all side road driving at the speed limit, or 10-15km/h over if there's traffic behind me. People who drive under the speed limit in any sort of traffic should be pulled over and ticketed - there's no excuse for it!

Brad

There are a LOT of bad things that hypermilers do that really do not gain them anything but maybe gunfire in their direction or incredibly angry people.

Drafting - drafting only really works behind semi trucks. 120 feet back and you get a 10-15% increase in gas mileage. any closer and you're simply a moron. Drafting a car, minivan or suv is just plain old stupid and is called tailgaiting. You are risking the lives of the person in front of you and is simply the single most stupid thing any person can do.

Coasting - coasting on a car with the engine off gives you MINIMAL gas savings. pushing in the clutch and coasting down that hill on the other hand DOES give you gas savings. the gas used while idling is incredibly minimal, the difference between a 5 minutes coast with engine off and engine idling cant be measured by any hypermiler. you save maybe 20-30 ml of gasoline.

Avoiding braking - yes this does work. but blowing through red lights and stop-signs is plain old stupid. Timing the lights is a smart idea but the guys that simply ignore stop signs simply because they THINK it's safe is moronic as well. They are assuming that others will react and not hit them. That is the single most stupid thing to do. a Hypermiler locally got put in jail for nailing a bicyclist when they rolled through a stopsign at 30mph to save a tiny amount of gas. Many hypermilers are also dangerous in parking lots, they go careening fast through parking lots trying to "conserve energy" at the cost of your safety. I have had words with several of these dangerous fools after almost getting hit by their unsafe antics.

Things that ACTUALLY work.

Drive conservatively, you waste a lot of gas dragracing from light to light. time lights in areas where you can. if you are rolling at least 5mph when you get to the light and can then easily accelerate you save a lot of gas. Also contrary to many silly hypermilers you do not save gas by flooring it up to speed. slower acceleration saves more gas.

Best thing to do to get better gas mileage - Tire pressure: air them up and go a couple of pounds over. tune up: make it run right. Drive slower: yes you save a CRAPLOAD of gas if you dont drive 85mph on the highway.

Finally the best thing you can do to save gas, get a dashboard vacuum gauge and work to keep the reading high. Higher vac readings means less gas used.

I get 27.6 to 28.5 mpg on my 4WD regularly. when I do long highway trips I get over 30mpg. I drive at the speed limit. I refuse to do the wierd hypermiler tricks because most are unsafe and silly at best.

My favorite hypermiler tip I think is dumb: coast into the parking lot, if you have too much speed to enter your space, continue to coast around until you are slow enough to park. --That tip is incredibly dumb, your brakes do NOT use gas when you are stopping to park your car.


Remember really think about anything they list on hypermiler sites. There are a lot of suspect and unsafe hypermiling tips out there.

In the hypermilers defense, kinetic energy = .5 x mass x velocity squared and the energy requirement gets big pretty fast as speed increases, so driving slower on the interstate generally saves gas as we can all agree. The problem is how slow you drive and where you do it. Driving the legal minimum in the left lane, in Florida anyway might draw gunfire (really). Otherwise driving the limit in the right lane should not warrant an issue from anyone except where conditions do not permit it safely.

There are some individuals that need to be reprogrammed and reminded of the speed limits and that you can't take ownership of the road not legally anyway, 3 lanes or more leaves plenty of room for negotiating speed limit drivers. Unfortunately there is the occasional nut (me on a rare occasion) that feels they should be able to drive as fast as they want in whatever lane they choose without having to change lanes to get around someone. That's dumb, tailgaiting is dumb, purposely jamming on your brakes to make a tailgaiter hit you is beyond words (been there, fortunately the guys that jumped out of the car I hit to council me on the matter happened to be someone I knew, that was a close one years ago).

Newer cars should incorporate some kind of electric storage cell and accompanying high torque motor to recover energy by using braking energy through the same electric motor to charge the storage cell, to be used around town at low speed.

Let's face it, smaller engines, longer gears and leaner AFRs are in. This country can't stand another gas shortage like that of the Carter era, fuel is the crack cocaine that keeps it going, there is no room left for cars to back up into the road and before long we will begin to live the reality of movies that depict America in caotic ruin. We headed for a police state in the very near future if gas continues on its current path.

America was not the live off credit economy back in the 70s that it is now and I'm certain poverty for an overwhelming number of Americans is about $8 per gallon away, because now every entity that offers a service to the public will dump their fuel cost increase onto the public with price increases as we are already seeing, so once you add in the cost increase from all those providers you can be sure there's ~$1 more that you are paying indirectly per gallon than what you see at the pump.

We are headed for more trouble than we can imagine, I hope I'm wrong but I seriously doubt it.

Mythbusters did a show about "drafting". They did prove that you DO get some benefit by being a car length or two back of a semi trailer. As stated above, you don't have to be right on their bumper to get some benefit.

Keeping to the speed limit or just below, coasting down from speed without using brakes and timing the traffic lights are the most effective techniques to save a decent amout of fuel. Of couse that comes after making sure the car is in a good state of tune and the tires are aired up nice and hard.