After lurking for months, I finally started recently posting.
It would be fare to say that I am a semi-eco driver. Especially with a vehicle that is probably very rare here, a 2001 Chevy Suburban!
Yes, howl away, but A) it is pretty much only driven weekly, and almost always loaded to capacity (except for emergencies, we only use it for volunteer stuff, be it hauling canned foods or adaptive equipment for the disabled). B) it has over 200,000 miles and I figure that everything between here and 300,000 is a lower total carbon footprint than replacing it, especially with a vehicle that can haul. And C) I still get better than EPA and keep the emissions stuff tip top. In fact, I simulate the narrow band O2 sensors so that I can fool the ECU into running much closer to peak cat efficiency more of the time.
That last one relates to my day job, which is taking these technologies:
EmiSense Technologies, LLC: Smart Sensors - Clean Emissions
And getting them into products and vertical applications. So what I did with my truck (yes, I'm a guy, so the SUV is a 'truck') is very much like something I had already done with engines like these:
The reason I started lurking was a rather different product that I was doing for a motorsports company. That may sound like a contradiction, but motorsports was the first commercial applications for Digital Direct(tm) technology. And, in its way, it helps make a 'dirty' application greener. The norm had been to run pig rich, but we demonstrated that the path to 'meaner' is often 'leaner' which happens to be 'greener' (bad puns intended).
After receiving an innovation award from MIT and the SAE for technologies that should be aggressively developed for addressing fuel efficiency and global warming, we've had the opportunity to move increasingly into 'green' applications, but we still have strong ties to motorsports.
Anyway, the product has a free companion iPhone app I was writing, and it was agreed that we could commit some views to Economy instead of just Performance. I ended up with a fill-up log, where I used GPM and GP100M and CPM and CP100M instead of MPG, because I think it better conveys to people how much fuel and money they use in accomplishing something. I also did some slightly more intelligent averaging, since I didn't want people topping up all the time to get meaningful results.
I also did a live economy view. After logging lots of miles for 10 drivers on 7 vehicles, and lots of internal discussion, I ended up with three different metrics. First, I show a raw MAF or MAP type MPG calculation (with no real attempt to weight or calibrate). This does give a vacuum gauge type response. Below it I show an average of the reading for the trip, and for the calendar day - but again, it is just 'fuel economy', not MPG (for the existing user base, calibrations and entering lots of supplemental info just didn't seem practical).
The second metric is a little animation. I used load and the raw MPG to present a reward for just driving a little less aggressively. A user here? No. But I figured if I could get the average driver to be even slightly less aggressive, it would be a plus.
The third metric is, well, odd. I wanted it to work without any hardware other than the iPhone, so I did a fairly sophisticated 3 axis motion estimation and vibration filter. I strove to create a reading where, if you just strive to keep it peaked, you end up adopting a lot of the more fuel efficient techniques that are discussed here.
I was originally tempted to show off my latest 'baby' here (I actually like how this one turned out, and it was one of those rare occasions where, for better or worse, it is all me, HW, firmware, software). But I don't want to be identified as a viral marketer! So, I'll just limit myself to showing a glimpse of a section of one of the first time 'read me' pop ups:
I did try to give proper credit where credit was due. And I hope that the comment about the reaction of other drivers doesn't offend. FWIW, I get my share of honks and digitus impudicus driving this way myself.
-jjf
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