Enough talk, lets see some analysis.
Lets look at 2 cases. Perhaps someone can compute the fuel consumption for each case with a typical car. Manual tranny, non hybrid.
The road is a long flat section, followed by a climb. The time to cover the course has to be the same for each method. You can pick the parameters for the length and grade. Try a couple of different courses. The intial and final conditions are the same for each method.
Method 1. DWL. It would be way simpler to do this in top gear, no down shift.
Method 2. Constant speed, begin a coast before the top of the hill so the speed at the top is the same as for the DWL case. This takes the descent out of the equation since you could use the same method (glide) for either case on the down side. The speed on the flat section will be slower for this case than for the DWL case since you don't lose time on the climb.
I know that you can save fuel by arriving at the top of the hill with a slower speed, but there are other ways to accomplish that such as the glide I just proposed in 2)
I know that you can save fuel on the climb by going slower, but you can also save fuel by going slower on the flats, so there is a trade off.
Maybe I'm overthinking this, but I don't think the solution is as obvous as you guys think it is.
My brief search didn't show up any open source simulations, but it seems like there's probably something out there somewhere. Perhaps some government project. It wouldn't be trivial, but it wouldn't be a huge task to code something up in matlab or octave. If someone knows of a sim out there point me to it. It doesn't have to be very complicated. This simple case could probably be done with some fairly simple script, but I won't be able to try it for a while. I'm sure one of you guys already have the tools ready to go
