The cheapest ways to save on gas
Posted
Jun 13 2008, 02:28 PM
by
Des Toups
The ultimate gas-saving gadget is very close to free: a scalding-hot cup of McDonald's coffee, perched in the cupholder next to your thigh -- with the lid off.
You'd drive a little differently, right? Maybe ease into the gas more than before, look ahead a little further so you don't have to slow down for the next light, or maybe even plan your route to avoid stops and starts altogether. Slow and steady wins the gas mileage race.
That's the entire premise behind "hypermiling," gas mileage treated as a competitive sport. Its most ardent fans wear the gas-miser's equivalent of spandex: blocked-off radiator intakes and cardboard duct-taped over the rear wheels to help cheat the wind. Yet even the these zealots would be the first to tell you it's the driver, not the car, that makes all the difference.
You'd like to duplicate their results (most can easily beat the EPA's mileage estimates by half, according to the posts over at CleanMPG, mecca for hypermilers), but without adding a tinfoil spoiler to the back of your minivan? Let's assume that you've done the easy, free stuff, like inflating your tires correctly, combining errands and removing all the junk in the trunk.
First, try the coffee trick, but maybe with a cup of tepid tap water first. The object is to avoid spilling anything, not to cheat death. That comes later.
Next, hypermiler Bill Walsh of Everett, Wash., recommends a $5 roll of duct tape to smooth out the front end of the car and a $5 pressure gauge to overinflate tires to 40 psi. "Use what you save to buy better tires next time," he advises. Better, to a hypermiler, means rock-hard, roll-forever cheapies.
If the coffee trick has you staring at the center console rather than the road, consider a gadget like the Digital Fuel Mizer, which does electronically what a sloshing cuppa joe does for free. A small box of vertical and horizontal accelerometers, it perches on your dashboard or any level spot, beeping and flashing any time the car isn't level (which it interprets as aggressive, fuel-wasting driving). MSRP is $69.95, but you can poke around and find it cheaper.
If you're going to spend money to save gas, the most efficient investment might be a real-time mpg gauge that keeps score as you drive. Many fancier newer cars have these standard (if there's any kind of mpg readout, check your owner's manual to see if the car has an instant-mpg setting). But if your car doesn't have one, the weapon of choice seems to be the ScanGauge, which plugs into the onboard diagnostics port on all 1996 and newer cars.
Nothing -- nothing -- will persuade you to drive more slowly than instantaneous evidence that you are throwing away money. Even a four-cylinder econobox will return single-digit fuel economy when floored from a stoplight. At about $175 shipped, it costs the equivalent of several tanks of gas. But it's a lot cheaper than a Prius, and the payoff could come in just a few months if it shaves 20% off a $200 monthly gas bill.
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