brick
07-05-2006, 08:47 AM
It wasn't a bad weekend for hypermiling. Half of my driving was in my own car, completing a personal best tank of ~41.6mpg. The other half of the driving was in my girlfriend's XC70 on our trip to visit my family with all our junk plus her black lab and my cat. She drove up and managed a very respectable 28.xmpg, touching 30mpg briefly prior to a six mile traffic jam. I would have tried to get her to DWB but it was such a dead crawl that it wouldn't have helped much. I drove back and fought hard for 29.5mpg against a non-stop headwind. Overall FE was not up to my expectations, but still OK for a car rated at 24mpg highway.
This morning's commute brought a thoroughly acceptable 44.6mpg. This result was surprising because of what I did differently: drive faster. The technique that I use for highway driving is kind of a hybrid of cruise control and DWL, and ends up looking a bit like HS P&G except that I only take it out of gear when I know I won't lose much speed due to the grade of the hill. The problem with this is that sometimes I'll end up dropping too much speed and have to "catch up" at a bad time. The 4mph of extra cruising speed (set at 62 instead of 58mph) allowed me more room for error, virtually eliminating the need to accelerate up-hill. It also allowed me to start each coast earlier since I wasn't so worried about losing speed. The great part of this is keeping up with right lane traffic and still beating the pants off of the EPA estimate!
This morning's commute brought a thoroughly acceptable 44.6mpg. This result was surprising because of what I did differently: drive faster. The technique that I use for highway driving is kind of a hybrid of cruise control and DWL, and ends up looking a bit like HS P&G except that I only take it out of gear when I know I won't lose much speed due to the grade of the hill. The problem with this is that sometimes I'll end up dropping too much speed and have to "catch up" at a bad time. The 4mph of extra cruising speed (set at 62 instead of 58mph) allowed me more room for error, virtually eliminating the need to accelerate up-hill. It also allowed me to start each coast earlier since I wasn't so worried about losing speed. The great part of this is keeping up with right lane traffic and still beating the pants off of the EPA estimate!