Should I trade in my gas guzzler?
Driving a 2002 GMC Yukon has its disadvantages lately. Filling up the gas tank costs $90 and our version of the truck lacks the cool FlexFuel engine.
Plus, I’m starting to get attitude from Toyota Prius drivers. Yes. These are the same guys who glide through a red light or speed up going downhill to maximize numbers on their mpg gauges.
There is no need to employ such absurd and possibly dangerous nempimaniac driving (from the Japanese word nempi which means fuel economy). Hypermiling has been a trend among hybrid owners, who compete to exceed the Environmental Protection Agency estimated mpg on their vehicles.
The estimated EPA mileage on my 2002 GMC Yukon: 13 city/17 highway mpg.
Reasonable hypermilers claim that anyone can adopt safe fuel efficient driving techniques. Start by driving the speed limit and keeping up vehicle maintenance.
Or… change the dynamics of traffic congestion.
Electrical Engineer William Beaty has been a proponent of the idea that one thinking person in a solitary vehicle can “erase traffic waves” and the toll they take on miles per gallon.
Beaty asserts that changing speed and competing with other drivers for headway contributes to traffic congestion. Plus, the hard stops and jackrabbit starts of aggressive driving are neither courteous nor fuel efficient.
What happens if you increase the gap with the car ahead while driving at a uniform speed? Beaty experimented with gaps in traffic by traveling at an average speed and employing the 2-second rule. Can you see the tires of the car ahead?
“Rather than repeatedly rushing ahead of everyone else, only to come to a halt, I decided to try to move at the average speed of the traffic.” Beaty writes. “I let a huge gap open up ahead of me, and timed things so I was arriving at the next ’stop wave’ just as the last red brakelights were turning off ahead of me.”
According to Beaty, adopting these mindful driving habits makes traffic behind you move more uniformly and smoothly. He claims this productively “eats” traffic congestion and improves fuel consumption for everyone on the road.
See! Even you can make a positive impact in that 1-ton dually!
Hypermiling.com is a Web site that also recommends drivers smoothly and moderately accelerate from stops.
Being the veritable lead foot that I am, I avoid looking at the tachometer. Yet, flooring the accelerator can’t be a smart thing. First, it causes excessive engine rev which increases fuel injection to the cylinders. And, this process tends to decrease engine performance and fuel efficiency.
Can monitoring the RPMs on the tachometer be a scientific way to measure the “calm, uniform, smooth” driving in Beaty’s experiments? What would happen to the mpg on a given vehicle with an RPM limit during acceleration?
What happens if I accelerate from stops while keeping the RPMs just under 2500? How would this simple driving moderation improve my Yukon’s mpg? By 5 mpg? What would happen if I kept the RPMs just under 2000?
