[manderson99]

Long story short, my old ride ('04 Saturn Ion 1 auto) is toast, so my wife has a new-to-her Mazda 5 and I get her old '01 Pt Cruiser auto as a hand-me-down for the foreseeable future.

Ordinarily this would not bother me, but I log about 60 miles per day on average thanks to 5 days per week of work commutes and 7 days per week of newspaper delivery. The commute is all city driving or aggressive highway driving, while the newspaper route involves plenty of stop-and-start driving that involves a great deal of accelerating to 30-40 mph, slowing down, accelerating again, and so forth and so on. As an added bonus, my route is on top of a ridge that requires a 1500-foot hill climb before I can even begin delivering any papers (if you've heard of it, it's the infamous 'W' road that goes up Signal Mountain/Walden's Ridge).

The PT has turned in a depressing 10-15 mpg on the route. I haven't figured its mileage on a combined paper route + commute yet, but it's probably not going to get any better.

Any suggestions on what I can do to improve the situation? I can't throw much money at the problem.