How do we educate our own ...
 

This is my rant regarding ecomodding, I say rant because many of my friends, coworkers, etc, think I'm a leppar because I drive slow. And say anyone can get better mileage if they slow down ??? THAT"S MY POINT !!!

-Yet the general masses want to drive at autobaun speed, then wait at a bank teller idling, to get money to wait at the Mcdonalds drive through, only to red light race home and still get 40+mpg.

I see it here all the time, people would rather build ginormous kamms, change their wheels, gut their interiors and block their grilles before slowing down, it simply makes no sense.

I wish we could make it manditory to have fuel logs on this site. The first being the tank you filled just after finding us, then subsequent tanks showing progress my slowing down and proper tire inflation. Then add some driving techniques. Now when you see this graph plateau it's time to start modding your car, as these mods do not represent major improvements in FE rather than refinements to help you achieve a specific goal.

Like dieting, the food you eat will not make you drop weight, its your COMMITMENT to changing your eating habits and excersize that will show the greatest improvements.

Why are we so stubborn to change? Feel better, now knock me off my soapbox ...

When I first got my Metro I started a fuel log before I found this site. I was getting around 44 mpg. Most of my driving is on the highway going to and from work at 65 mph. Then I read the hypermilling tips and now I get an avg of 50 mpg and I do not go over 55mph.

Friends and coworkers already have their minds made up. You can present the God honest truth with facts and figures to back it up, and it doesn't matter one bit to them UNLESS they are seeking to change. Don't worry about what they think of hypermiling. But by the same token, if they complain about fuel costs tell 'em to shut their stupid pieholes.

I'm not sure if I should sympathize or take insult on this.....

Do you think I don't get my fair share of jabs and prodding for my driving style? The analytical testing for my Kamm has always been 55mph..... Not 70 (max speed limit in FL) or 80 or some other asinine speed... I will probably test at higher speeds nearer to the end to make sure I won't cause nasty steering conditions.


Lately, I rarely do a full fuel up... I fuel up based on market trends and my own self rationing. Rather than shoot for purely max mpg, I shoot for a period of time without fueling up. Sometimes I make my goals, other times I don't. But it requires not only a change in driving technique, but a change in driving lifestyle. That is, not driving when unnecessary on top of attempting to max fuel economy when driving.

And on the subject of kettles and their blackness - even you started fiddling before plateauing according to the notes in your fuel log.

That, and I, as a designer, feel that doing nothing (or ranting about others doing) until you plateau from driving style is innovation/design censorship.

I like the dieting analogy... But, I feel your analysis is short sighted. No, you don't just change what you eat. But changing habits (driving style) while ignoring what it is your eating (the vehicle itself) isn't going to be as beneficial as changing both habit and food.

Healthy habits - stop eating in excess
Healthy diet - stop accepting pure crap as food
Exercise - testing physical limits

Healthy Driving Habits - stop driving so fast
Healthy Diet - don't accept poor design
Exercise - test, everything (challenge yourself)



So I say all that and accept that it is not within my power, your power, any of our powers combined to change people. It's just not going to happen and any attempt to will likely result in a reaffirmation that their excess is just fine. They need to change themselves, first. Changing what they drive - now that's easy :thumbup:

People have to be forced to conserve. That's how it has been and how it will always be. As an ecomodder/hypermiler, being someone who's different from the mass, you have to accept that and be done with it. Grow a thick skin and go on with your own business. You can only spread the word to those with open ears. When they'll face no other choice, they'll listen.

I think you're missing the point. I don't particularly want to slow down (not that I'm one of the world's fastest drivers, at least on freeways & other boring straight roads), I want a car that gets 100 mpg (or better, or equivalent KWh/mile) when I drive it at whatever speed I happen to want to drive. Sure, we could all drive something like Neil Young's Linc-Volt at 30 mph. or we could use the same amount of energy to drive a Tesla at 80 or so, and have a lot more fun.

"Sure, we could all drive something like Neil Young's Linc-Volt at 30 mph. or we could use the same amount of energy to drive a Tesla at 80 or so"

At $109,000 a pop, I don't think so.

I see fast driving as a problem caused by poor time management. For example, my dad feels that everything within the county is just a 15 minute drive away. This often leads to very fast and aggressive driving. And he is not enjoying it one bit.

I have yet to perfect my time management. All to often I get to class way too early. And that gets boring.

i have always enjoyed driving. And i found out that the slower i go the longer i get to drive for the same money.
i have noticed a big pickup in the pace of traffic since the price here is $1.58a gallon.

PS. I have driven I-4 across Fl. and it is exciting. I have never saw such a large number of drivers in one place, that are all late for a tee time.

I love how everyone all day around here has the "late-for-something" driving style.. even at the times that noone is on the road, you still have some idiot tailing you waiting for the next passing zone.

I personally am not the slowest driver out there, but I do tend to take it easy anymore... I used to do 80+ even on backroads, dirt roads, whatever I was driving on. Lucky I"m not dead, honestly.

I've never had a problem talking to people about conserving fuel, or suggesting ways they could get better gas mileage... but in my hobbies, it's kind of counter-intuitive, since I'm talking to performance enthusiasts, mostly. They WANT to go fast, and don't really care what it takes, energy wise.

Then there are the people that are normally pretty conscious, but they have alot of "just this one time" moments...

Or, like my wife's mom, "It's only $30... it's not that big of a deal." Except when "It's only $30", 5 times a month. That's another $150 a month... don't ask me to pay your bills next week, OK?

I don't have a problem with the way anyone wants to do anything, honestly, my issue comes in when they start complaining about things, but doing nothing about it. OBVIOUSLY, we can't directly control the gas prices... but we can (sort of) control how much we spend on it.

I can't think of how many people I've laughed at (literally, in their face) for complaining about gas prices, then talking about how fast they were going on the way to work that day... or how they only had 1 minute to clock in when they got there, etc.

OK, then the Honda Insight I bought used for about $8500, and have averaged 70+ mpg over the 5 years I've had it, by not driving particularly slow. Or the CRX I had before that, that would do better than 40 mpg. Or even my long-gone Austin-Healey Sprite.

The point is that there's a lot more to be gained by changing the cars so they're more efficient, than from forcing everyone to drive slowly. And it's likely to be easier: you just spend some advertising money selling the idea of small, nimble, fun cars instead of oversized penis substitutes, instead of hiring bunches of traffic cops, with all the support apparatus.

And how much gas would be wasted by having all those extra traffic cops driving around in their Crown Vics all day?

Many here think Im an old fart for driving the speed limit and taking it easy. My friends, my coworkers, even my wife. I dont care.

Many here also take positive notice of my ecomods and how I am getting the mpg I am getting. They think it is cool. I explained how they could save gas money, especially some the long distance drivers. But it just doesnt matter enough to them to try it for themselves. Their loss I guess. Its hard to change when the EPA gods say that a certain vehicle is supposed to get a certain mpg and those are the people who pay someone else to do every service for them. A bumper sticker Ive been thinking of is "Ecomodder.com - Your mpg is up to you".

I dont know about that for sure. I know at least me, I joined here because I was interested in saving fuel. And I had been interested in saving fuel long before I found the site. So before joining here I already had done the things I knew I could do, and slowing down was #1 on the list. Might as well start with what can be done for free and without work. The mods were for seeking further improvement.

Yes I totally agree with you there. Put all those Super Doodie drivin' leadfoots into Metros and they can keep their bad behavior- at least the damage will be less.

If only the police drove Metros... they'd be easier to out run...

Or, 4 guys could move their car to another parking space while they're in getting donuts... lmao.

Ah, dreams are fun.

I like to split the difference.

If I can improve my car's efficiency through mods, I will likely spend some of the "efficiency dividend" on slightly higher speeds (highway cruising, I'm talking about).

So my average speed (which is already WELL below average, where I'm not impeding traffic) goes up, but so does my fuel efficiency, compared to pre-mod. Win - win!

I mean, sure I could probably pulse and glide to my destination at an average speed of 15 mph and get 130-150 mpg (US). But does that make sense?

In the event that everything is a 20 minute drive to the other side of a country town where there is no legal speed limit and no paved roads, yes.

I used to love messing around on dirt roads.

I used to own a Chevy Sprint... a two door hatch back with a 0.9L 3cyl engine... that thing was LIGHT, and it still took 6 people (granted not the biggest high schoolers) to lift it and move it in between two huge trucks... Not to say it couldn't be done with 4 big guys...

I'm not big, but me and another guy equal to my size can lift the whole front of my car off the ground.

I weigh about 150lbs, 5'8", no muscle tone at all... in fact, I appear quite the opposite of a stereo-typical "strong" person my age (23).

When I put the engine in my 4th gen Honda, I lifted the old one out with a strap around my neck... it's about 300lbs with the transmission and accessories, still full of fluids.

I didn't put the new one in that way though, I used the help of my roommate at the time.

It took four of us to move my friend's old VW beetle 50 feet (school science teacher thing) And I would venture to say that none of us was much bigger than I am now.

Point is, it's not so much how stong you look or how big you are, it's knowing how to use the strength you have to your advantage.

This applies everywhere, all the time, including non-physical strengths.

A lot of adrenaline or PCP can help with strength....

RE the speeding masses:

People do things without thinking. Life is a series of habits and only conscious thought will reveal them to the robotic do'er.

When a pick pocket meets a holy man, he will only see his pockets.

If everyone in the world meditated all at the same time, just once, for only 15minutes, on the benefits of slowing down, sitting cross legged on the bonnet of their car, we would see emergency departments emptier, domestic violence down, crime down...

But alas if everyone took twice as long to get somewhere there would be twice as many cars on the road????

Or if everyone travelled twice as fast there would be half as many cars on the road, less congestion, reduced vehicle accident probabilities (not including speed related), less waiting at lights.....

Oh I'm so confused

Except that describes the conditions where I'm going to ride my bike instead of drive. :)

I'm afraid neither of those things is true... And I'm only bothering to type this so that I don't hear some kid 5 years from now trying to speculate on traffic patterns based on people's speed.

If everyone in the world drove 2x as fast as they do now, there would be just as many cars on the road as at any other instant, but they'd all be there for a shorter time.

If everyone drove 1/2 the speed they normally do, there would also be just as many cars as any other instant, but they'd be there for a longer time.

The number of vehicles does not multiply/divide, only the time spent on the road.

I don't believe it has so much to do with the speed that some people drive, as everyone doing a constant speed. If everyone in your (not YOUR, generalized) area had the same, predictable driving style, we'd see less accidents, since we'd all know exactly how to react to each driving situation.

Since this isn't the case, and plotting driving styles on a scale would prove more erratic than Bush's speeches, there is less information when it comes time for a person to decide what maneuvers will avoid a crash situation.. less information == less informed decision == more "I hope" and less "I know".

I don't quite follow your logic. (OK, I'm being overly polite, I really think your logic's wrong :-)) If (important point) trip starting times are random, and every car moves twice as fast, then obviously there'll be half as many cars on the road at any given instant. At the other extreme, if every trip starts at the same time, you'll have the same number of cars on the road at the start, but the number will diminish faster.

Of course the real world is somewhere between these two extremes - a lot of people do tend to leave work around 5, for instance - but I can see this in action on the local roads. I live off a 4-lane highway that's the only practical route between two populated areas. Even at rush hour, traffic normally moves at about 60 mph, and flows freely, so that it takes maybe 10 minutes for any individual car to get through the bottleneck. Let something - an accident or a snowstorm - slow down the flow, then it can take an hour or more to get through, and traffic will be backed up for miles on either end.

another way of looking at it, if everyone could move at the speed of light, you would only have very few people on the roads at a time (since the travel time to anywhere on earth would be so fast). At the same time, I wouldn't want to pull out in front of someone going that fast. So although it is possible to get places very very fast, and have few people on the roads at the same time, that doesn't make it any more safe.

This is pretty much what I meant to say... apparently you said it better than I did, since I understood your explanation better than my own. LOL.

Anyway, in this area, it's been proven (and is still being laughed about by people like me) that traffic patterns are VERY VERY VERY difficult to change... they installed a red light from RT581 Gettysburg exit (RT 15 S) to get onto RT 15. It has screwed up traffic patterns considerably, and people still don't seem to know how to react to stopping at a red light on an exit ramp... some don't "see" the light, and drive right through it, since they don't expect it to be there... this has been 4 years in the making.

Perhaps you might meditate on the idea that for some people, safety isn't the primary consideration.

However, I'd argue - and from experience, since any time I want to go somewhere, I have to pull out on that road I described - that it is actually safer to pull out when traffic is moving faster, because then it tends to bunch up, leaving gaps between "flocks" of cars where I can pull out safely. When it gets locked down into a slow mode, there are no gaps, and it's next to impossible.

I pull into slow moving traffic the same as fast traffic... find a hole, and go for it.

Granted, slow moving traffic tends to have smaller gaps, but people moving slow also have more time to react to me pulling out in front of them because they weren't decent enough to allow me room to pull out.

I suppose I'm contradicting myself about the safety thing, but I try not to assume that other people are going to react to me. If I see that I can't accelerate/change lanes to avoid them, I don't go.

Of course that's on my good days. On the bad ones, I drive as though a significant fraction of other drivers are intentionally trying to hit me. You may call this paranoid, but I say the evidence is in my favor...

LOL.. I can't imagine what it must be like for you to get to work every day.

Almost any place I want to go is on the highway, so over the years, I've kinda adapted that highway merging strategy everywhere else too, and it works out pretty well for me.

Oh, that's easy. Morning routine is to get up, start coffee, feed dog, turn computer on, fix own breakfast while it's booting, and start working. I telecommute :-)

lucky bass... i'd love to work from home and it not be a scam.

It would give me more time to work on my CR-X.