fixedintime
09-04-2008, 05:02 PM
I have started to play with this and thought I'd see if anyone has developed a strategy for this situation.
I park in a garage for work. Luckily I'm on the first floor with easy entry and exit. So here is the situation. Back out of the parking space (for my choices this time it turns out to be better to accept the fact that I'll be backing out).
Then I have about a 100 yard circle around the garage to a stop sign. After the stop it is another 50 yards to a second stop sign, then 25 yards to a traffic light - which is almost certainly going to be red. Right turn at the light. After the turn it is another 100 yards to the next traffic light. This light will then be red unless I can make a right on red early in the cycle for the previous light - which is unlikely to happen. After that is it smooth sailing through the next light and onto the expressway.
In the garage with a 5mph speed limit and traffic second gear is too high. So what I have been doing it getting it up to 2nd, without touching the gas, and then play a mini P&G around the garage, after each stop sign and through the two lights without ever hitting the gas pedal.
I began to doubt that this is the best strategy and was thinking of just leaving it in 1st through the garage and in either 1st or 2nd as need be to keep me going between the stop signs and the two traffic lights. Again I never need to hit the gas pedal.
What got me thinking was I noticed that in neutral I start off around 1400 rpm with the cold engine. This slowly drops to about 700 as the engine warms up. But if I put the car in gear it drops to the 700 rpm. So I said to myself 1400 rpm means more gas. So today I set the sg to show gpm. There I was surprised to see that the gpm level was the same with the cold engine both when I was in neutral and when I was in 1st gear.
This tells me that the best strategy would be to do what warms the engine up the fastest. At this point I'm inclined to go back to my mini p&g routine under the assumption that the high rpm will warm the engine faster.
Any thoughts???
I park in a garage for work. Luckily I'm on the first floor with easy entry and exit. So here is the situation. Back out of the parking space (for my choices this time it turns out to be better to accept the fact that I'll be backing out).
Then I have about a 100 yard circle around the garage to a stop sign. After the stop it is another 50 yards to a second stop sign, then 25 yards to a traffic light - which is almost certainly going to be red. Right turn at the light. After the turn it is another 100 yards to the next traffic light. This light will then be red unless I can make a right on red early in the cycle for the previous light - which is unlikely to happen. After that is it smooth sailing through the next light and onto the expressway.
In the garage with a 5mph speed limit and traffic second gear is too high. So what I have been doing it getting it up to 2nd, without touching the gas, and then play a mini P&G around the garage, after each stop sign and through the two lights without ever hitting the gas pedal.
I began to doubt that this is the best strategy and was thinking of just leaving it in 1st through the garage and in either 1st or 2nd as need be to keep me going between the stop signs and the two traffic lights. Again I never need to hit the gas pedal.
What got me thinking was I noticed that in neutral I start off around 1400 rpm with the cold engine. This slowly drops to about 700 as the engine warms up. But if I put the car in gear it drops to the 700 rpm. So I said to myself 1400 rpm means more gas. So today I set the sg to show gpm. There I was surprised to see that the gpm level was the same with the cold engine both when I was in neutral and when I was in 1st gear.
This tells me that the best strategy would be to do what warms the engine up the fastest. At this point I'm inclined to go back to my mini p&g routine under the assumption that the high rpm will warm the engine faster.
Any thoughts???