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Lets say you've taken steady speed to its limit and are traveling at the bottom of top gear, let's say at 40 MPH. Two questions.
1.How do you DWL when you reach a hill? If you decrease speed you'll be forced to downshift, which I think is obvious would waste more gas.
2. How do you get better Fuel economy from P&G? The only way you can extend the bracket is to faster speeds. I'd say 10 MPH is the minimum speed change to realistically take when doing a P&G, so in this case you'd pulse to 50, then back down to 40, then back up to 50. Given that the average speed in this case is 45, that increases air resistance by 26% over the steady speed. That, along with all the reasons listed above, to me would mean that P&G would not actually be a bigger gas saver. It would require much more effort and clutch wear, though.
Oh and by the way, concerning the compression losses, a while back I tested my car's 0-60, and found approximately a 20% loss of power over it's original rating, at full throttle. True there's a lot of factors, but I would say we could roughly estimate that that is approximately the loss of power encountered by having really high loads using that engine. That to me is a really significant factor too when considering P&G.
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