June 22, 2008

Saving Gas: Top Two Gas Saving Tips

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."

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