Hypermiling - push your mpg to the max

This summer, everyone seems to have been talking about “hypermiling” - the American name given to the practice of managing to squeeze the maximum MPGs out of a tank of petrol by changing your driving habits. There’s even this site dedicated to it in the US and I’ve just found this one in the UK. The long and the short of it is that with the right driving techniques you can get a lot more miles out of a tank of petrol.

The obvious tips are:

Don’t drive agressively. Accelerate slowly, and avoid having to slam on the brakes by anticipating traffic and red lights.

Keep your revs low; change up when you don’t need the extra power, and keep at or below the speed limit on motorways.

Switch off your engine if you think you’re going to be stopped in traffic for more than about 10-15 seconds.

Keep your car serviced. Make sure the tires are at the optimum pressure.

Coast if it’s safe to down hills and up to red lights by putting your foot on the clutch and letting the engine’s revs drop.

Don’t use air-conditioning. Luckily we’ve had a perfect summer for that one.

Take off the roof bars and the top box off. Admit it. That box has been empty for weeks, hasn’t it?

All of which makes a lot of sense. I don’t drive much, but when I do I find that keeping one eye on the revs, or seeing how far the car coasts makes the tedious activity of moving a car from A to B at least slightly more entertaining. If we have to drive we should at least try and produce as few emissions as we can, and who wouldn’t want to save money on petrol? Here’s another list of hypermiling tips.

Of course the irony is that hypermilers already have acquired a reputation for becoming dangerously competitive about the whole thing by adopting extreme hypermiling techniques, like switching off the engine, or even more dangerously, “drafting”, the technique by which one gets so close to the vehicle in front that one is pulled along by its slipstream. Look out for the forums where people boast how low their MPG is; it’s kind of like mirror image version of boy racers.

There are even hypermiler stars, like Wayne Gerdes, “King of the Hypermilers”, profiled here:

On a midsummer Saturday in a sprawling Wisconsin parking lot, about a dozen people are milling about a candy-apple red Honda Insight. They’re watching Wayne Gerdes prepare for his run in Hybridfest’s mpg Challenge, a 20-mile race through the streets of Madison. Wayne is the odds-on favorite to win the challenge, in which drivers compete to push the automotive limits not of speed and power—a desire those gathered here consider old-fashioned and wasteful—but for the unsexy title of Most Fuel-Efficient Driver in the World.

Wayne is believed to be that driver, but he’s nervous, because all day long the hypermilers—the term Wayne invented to describe the band of brothers who push the limits of fuel efficiency—have been getting crazy-high miles-per-gallon readings, as much as 100 mpg.

It was Wayne, apparently, who originally coined the term “hypermiling”.
Of course if you mix boys with cars - even in the cause of a greener future - it’s going to get competitive. For some it’s an obsession. There’s even a word for it: Nempimania,
derived from the Japanese word for “fuel economy”. Trust the makers of the Prius to have such a sopisticated vocabulary.

Of course the best way to hypermile is to take the bus. But there you go.

Thanks to Tom Magliery for the photo.

 Blogmemes  |   Del.icio.us  |   Digg  |   Furl  |   Google  |  Netscape  |   PlugIM  |   Reddit  |   Squidoo  |   StumbleUpon  |   Technorati  |   Yahoo My Web

This entry was written by Nigel and posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 4:39 pm and filed under Travel, Good things to do, Energy saving tips, Links, Co2 emissions. Bookmark the permalink. You can follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

---