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No love for my thread...lol
Eagerly anticipating the arrival of my OFT tomorrow. Today I did quite a bit of driving and on some stretches of flat highway I tried P&G again but this time being light on the pedal. This car is awesome for coasting, when I was on the 280, my terminal velocity on the long stretches of moderate downward slope was as high as 75mph! In my Spyder I couldn't even maintain 60, although that car is much lighter which doesn't help.
Cruise control 60mph returned ~42mpg, surprisingly good. It was interesting watching the gauge as cars went into my lane ahead of me, even Corolla leading by 50ft or so would bump me up to 44mpg or so, and an SUV at 50ft would be 45.
Then I tried pulse and glide, letting the speed float between 56-57 and 64-65ish. The way I controlled load was by looking at the instantaneous mpg gauge: steady state cruise is 42mpg, corresponding to ~30% load. 50% load is the highest I can go without hitting enrichment, corresponding to ~25mpg. It's very hard to control the pedal that finely but I kept it between 24 and 30 during the "pulse".
This unfortunately averaged 41.1mpg :/ It seems like 50% load does not give a big enough efficiency increase on this engine to offset the slightly larger average power requirement of fluctuating speed. I might have averaged a little more than 60mph but either way, the results weren't good.
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