Driving When Angry Could Be Dangerous To Your Wallet!
Are you angry about the soaring cost of gas? If you take that anger out behind the wheel, you could actually end up spending even more on gasoline.
Driving tests done by the popular automotive site Edmunds.com showed that angry, aggressive drivers typically engage in habits that waste fuel, such as speeding, stop and go driving, and racing up to red lights or intersections, then slamming on the brakes.
Every time you touch either the brake or gas pedal, the fuel in your gas tank turns into heat energy. Rapid acceleration floods the engine with extra gas, causing the car to burn excess fuel. And riding the brakes causes the vehicle to waste the energy used to get it up to speed. Rapid acceleration and braking waste so much fuel it can actually lower your gas mileage by more than 20%.
By the same token, speeding uses more energy than driving at a slower, constant speed.
All this means that angry, aggressive drivers who speed, tailgate and brake hard will pay a penalty at the gas pump when they have to fill up more often than calmer drivers who maintain a steady cruising speed and avoid unnecessary acceleration and braking.
Most drivers don't realize how much money their aggressive driving habits may be costing them. But a new study taking place in Denver, Colorado is betting that once drivers actually see the connection between their bad driving behavior and the consequences at the gas pump, they'll make changes.
The study installs a device in volunteer's vehicles that record every fast start, every hard brake, every too-fast turn around a corner. Monitors in the cars give drivers real-time feedback on how they're doing. The study will determine whether or not drivers who see actual evidence of their bad driving habits will be motivated to change.
The idea of real-time monitoring of fuel consumption is one embraced by a new breed of drivers called hypermilers - drivers who try to squeeze every last ounce of efficiency out of the fuel they burn. They typically drive with monitors and devices that give them instant feedback on how modifications to their driving habits as well as their vehicles affect fuel efficiency.
The stud, being done in Denver, Colorado, is aimed at finding ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by altering the habits of drivers who waste fuel. But because angry, aggressive drivers are one of the leading causes of accidents, it's hoped that motivating them to change will pay back benefits in educed accidents and deaths, as well.
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Gas Saving - Using Less Gas
Will using air conditioning save gas?
What about cruise control?
How much gas do aggressive drivers waste?
These were among the questions addressed in the study by Edmunds.com, the online auto research site.
The two biggest gas-saving tricks, it turns out, are using cruise control, which improved gas mileage by as much as 14%, and driving less aggressively, which pumped up mileage by up to 35%, based on road tests of two cars.
"Most people will have substantial savings if they adjust the way they drive," said Mike Hudson, consumer advice editor at Edmunds and co-author of the study.
That means, for instance, accelerating more slowly. Hudson characterized it as changing "zero to 60 in ten seconds" to "zero to 60 in 20 seconds."
During the lead-foot test, he said, "it became very clear to us how much driver input plays into your mileage."
Obviously, the gas savings will vary based on the vehicle driven and driving conditions. Hudson and co-author Philip Reed tested a Ford Mustang GT and a Land Rover LR3 SE.
Using the "feather foot" approach, the Land Rover's gas mileage improved about 35% and the Mustang's gained 27%.
The Edmunds testers conducted their work in a remote California location, and controlled for conditions as much as possible by testing the various gas-saving strategies back-to-back, to avoid changes in wind and temperature which might affect gas mileage.
Cruising to savings
The other primary means of gas savings available to drivers: Cruise control. When the testers set the cars to cruise, the Land Rover gained almost 14% in gas savings, while the Mustang used about 5% less gas.
Cruise control "keeps you at constant speed," Hudson said. Without it, "it may seem like you're going fairly evenly as you drive along, but you're slowing down a bit, pushing on the gas a bit. The cruise control keeps it much steadier. Your RPMs are much more steady and it burns much more efficiently."
How to cool down? It's a toss up
The study did not point to significant gas savings for rolling the windows down rather than using air conditioning.
"With the windows down, we saw improvement on both vehicles but only of 1.6% with the Land Rover, and 4.1% with the Mustang," Hudson said, not a strong enough pointer either way.
Ensuring the cars' tires were properly inflated yielded similarly nondefinitive results, 4.4% improvement in gas mileage for the Land Rover and zero for the Mustang.
But Hudson is quick to point out that testing occurred on a very hot day, and hot pavement makes tires expand while driving, possibly skewing the results.
"The federal government has said there's a 5% improvement" in gas mileage when tires are properly inflated, he said. "We didn't find that ... but since the pavement was so hot, it makes your tires expand. We always recommend people follow the maintenance schedules in their owner's handbook."
For a complete manual of gas-saving, Hypermiling techniques - Check out Secrets2Hypermiling.com
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