|
Yes and thanks to all the above.
I kind of figured the belly pan area on a little front wheel drive would do the most of an underbody cleaning. I understand the futility of removing much weight short of the spare, lighter rims, etc. Would love to strip a car down to zero interior, lexan side windows, tiny battery, whatever to see how light I could get it. For the weight loss freaks there is quite a few pounds of sound deadener under your carpets, in trunk, on firewall, etc that can be stripped away.
I'm not really considering any mods to the suburban anyway. I don't drive it that much, rarely fill it to check mileage, speedo is off from tire size, etc. I just drive it easy when I have to and do better than most do with the big trucks because they have big feet. Best way to save gas on that baby is leave the keys on the hook!
I'm looking for maybe a 1 liter metro if I can find one without too much underbody rust in salty se michigan. I may go with another single cam saturn s series. I was mighty impressed how well it did under my uneducated hyper-mileing.
Things I would likely do would be air dam, lower ride height, remove passenger side exterior mirror, skinnier tires, higher inflation, lighten up trans oil, possibly clean up front end with some grill blocking, possible belly pan, kill off un-nessecary evil weight adding passengers, dump spare tire, etc.
A few of the tiny tips I've read here that I liked and will utilize are parking on thru spots, find gravity parking spots, trans fluid viscosity.
It gets to be quite a game and more to beat personal bests than the pennies saved per trip. Lots of light hearted fun too. Drove my kids nuts last summer.. "no! can't put the air conditioning on". Ha, pulse and glide even bugged them.
ooh, I'll be bypassing the power steering also, not needed for me in small light car. Thinking about playing the alternator game after reading a bazillion pages on that post.
Anyone consider the weight of a full tank of gas and simply run on the bottom half of the tank for a few fill ups and just keep track of gas added and fill up beginning and end for average?
|