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Old 02-06-2008, 10:58 PM   #5 (permalink)
NoCO2
Bicycle Junky
 
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Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: Atlanta, GA
Posts: 464

Putsaround - '96 Toyota Camry LE
90 day: 32.74 mpg (US)

The Commuter - '07 Trek 1000SL
90 day: 617.28 mpg (US)

Zippy - '91 Honda Civic DX
90 day: 33.29 mpg (US)
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My Camry is an automatic and it does pretty well, but it has relatively little torque compared to it's weight so it's very shift happy on hills.

What I have done so far is mainly just try not to accelerate much past 2000RPM if I can help it. When I am on the highway is the only time I make an exception to that rule because it goes to 2100RPM at 65mph which isn't terrible, but again it's very happy to shift out of O/D if it finds a small hill.

I also knock the car into neutral at the slightest downhill, even if I don't think there is enough hill to allow me to maintain speed, I always try since I'm still trying to learn what hills it works on and which it doesn't, but I try to read the hills and judge if I will be able to maintain speed in neutral and usually, since my car coasts rather well, I can get away with it so I put it in neutral to keep the RPMs down as much as possible since coasting down a hill at 55mph puts the engine at 1900RPM, but in neutral it idles back down to 800RPM.

One thing I'm considering doing, and I still need to do more research on this before I do it, is remapping the ECU controls for the transmission to make it want to stay in gear longer before it tries shifting down. I have noticed many times that I merely want to maintain speed going up a hill, but it down shifts unnecessarily, forcing me to lose speed to observe my 2000RPM self limit. There are commercially made computers that you can plug into the OBDII port under the dash that can do this pretty simply and many performance auto shops will have special computers that they can plug in and do the same thing, but often times a bit better since they tailor it to your car and your preferences. This only works on certain, OBD2 cars though and that is the part I need to do more research on.
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