Introduction

mallard · #1 10-03-2008, 08:52 AM

I live in central New Jersey, USA in a suburban community. I commute to the New York metropolitan area by diesel train. My primary transportation is a 2001 Yamaha V-Star 650 which unfortunately averages only 42mpg. My secondary transportation is a 2006 Honda Civic 5M, which averages 35mpg. I use these vehicles for the 3.5 mile journey to the train station, so I spend a lot of time making short trips. My monthly fuel consumption is about 15 gallons, (not factoring in my share of the diesel required to run the train).

I do not hypermile on my motorcycle. But in both vehicles, I disengage the ICE before coasting into a parking space. However, I often park head-out in my Honda, so I need to keep the engine running until after I squirt the throttle while in reverse gear.

I maintain my engines with care. I monitor oil quality and the air filter. Tire inflation is checked every 500 miles for the car, every 100 for the bike. I keep the Honda's tire pressure around 38psi in the summer and 36psi in the winter. In snow and ice, I drop the pressure to 32psi and immediately reinflate them after roads clear. This improves my traction in bad conditions and helps the tread wear a bit more normally.

I use a handful of hypermiling techniques in my car:

I drive with my car clean and empty. I keep a first aid kit and road flares alongside my spare tire; that's about it.

I drive with load (DWL), meaning I decelerate uphill and recover speed downhill. In (rare) low-traffic conditions, I use my cruise control on flat surfaces.

I drive with buffers (DWB) in traffic. Since I have a manual transmission, I rarely use the brakes. I simply downshift and outclutch to shave off speed when I need to.

I skip upshifts when rapid acceleration is not needed. In slow residential areas, I often jump from 1 to 3 or 2 to 4. Once I obtain an appropriate speed, I engage 5th gear, letting the engine putter along at a low rpm.

I do not have tools to monitor my fuel consumption in real-time. When I refuel, I divide the trip odometer by the gallons added to fill the tank, then reset the trip odometer. My motorcycle has no fuel gauge, so the trip odometer is quite important.

My record economy in the motorcycle was 43mpg. In the Civic, I reached 40mpg once on a long-distance drive along 50mph roads. It was this trip that made me realize that aero drag, even on a vehicle as well designed as the 06 Civic, has a noticeable effect on fuel economy as speed increases.

I think I am here because I am upset with the FE of my motorcycle, which I will likely address with a new thread some day.