So incredibly glad to find a place like this.. I was taping up the grill on my 2002 Explorer Sport long ago.. I had it up to 23mpg running 80mph on the hwy with people and gear. Of course the exhaust and such was done to help. I always knew that there was way too much turbulance under the body of it and was planning on modding it even more. Never got around to it though, my wife and I were getting married and decided to trade her Mazda3 and my Explorer in on a Mazdaspeed6 to consolidate payments and save some money.
Now to my current ecomodding.
About 2 years ago I got all excited about hypermiling and what was possible by using these simple techniques. Well I was laughed at by my wife. Well now she is the one hypermiling due to the higher gas prices.. she drives 12 miles one way to work, not in the Mazdaspeed6 (its the weekend car) but in a car I picked up for 1200bucks a year ago, in her Mazda MX-3. It is a 1992 model with a 1.6ltr 4 popper, milling out 88hp. I have done different things to it to see if I could get better mileage out of it, due to the fact she drives it the exact same route everyday. To which she used to laugh at me for making her car ugly but now she is all about it.
On average the car would get 31mpg with her driving it to and from work, on a hwy trip we could squeeze 32-34 out of it, this is all with the A/C on, for living in Oklahoma is quite brutal at times. Well now that she is into getting better mileage she improved her MPG to 34.8 with simply slowing down and clutching the hills and rolling stops and such. Great improvment. This improvment was without any aero mods at all. So I told her I was going to make the car ugly and tape it up. She was all for it now, and she said to me "take the back seat out too" LOL so we now have tape on all but a small portion of the grill, aired up tires, no mud flaps, no back seats or spare... and the last trip we took at 68mph and some city traffic, we averaged 38.5mpg.
I am excited..
There is more to come on the aero mods, these are simple things I have done, taped up the grill and put a cardboard belly pan on it.. I think I am going to do the whole front now and start figuring out how to get the rear bumper out of the equation as far as wind drag, the under carriage is actually pretty smooth on this old car, but I may put a screen on it. And skirts are not out of the picture. She is shooting for 40mpg average, then if we can acheive that we are going for the 10mpg improvement of 42mpg. All on a car I paid 1200 bucks for with a working a/c... and it now has 168,000 miles on it. HAha
Anyway that is a quick probably miss spelled look into our new adventure. Love the site!!!
Stigler