hypermiling for one year now
 

Hi everybody,
I'd like to introduce myself.
Living in the North of Germany, a flat country with some hills, I always was self-employed and had to reach my customers with a radius of up to 40 miles. So I used to drive 60% country roads, 25% city traffic and 15% motorways.
At the age of 50+ I already had a lot of cars: always 2nd hand, mostly Diesel coz I'm driving about 15k miles a year. As Diesel is a little bit cheaper than Gasoline here and the consumption is less it was no question what to take.
In March 2016 I bought a 9 years old Ford Fusion 1.6 TDCi. It's not the American Fusion. In Europe they gave this name to a small car, based on the Ford Fiesta, just a little bit higher.
So it's more comfortable to sit in, more space for luggage than the Fiesta has and not so heavy but the coefficient of drag as well as the frontal area are rather bad. So from 50 mph on the wind gets more influence and the consumption is rising. Even the car can go up to 95 mph on the German motorway I did it once only to try if it is possible. The mileage decreased to 10 mpg then.
After starting to use this car a few weeks later I bought a ScanGauge. This was the first car I ever had with a plug for this kind of devices. So I started to make experiments how to save fuel and after short time I developed "pulse and glide" with "engine off coasting" on my own without ever having heard of it before. When talking to other people about it they called me crazy. It's too dangerous, it's forbidden to do so in Germany, it will kill my car...
The money I saved in this way would be less than the price for the repairs later.
Anyhow they all couldn't stop me from improving my driving style.

Now I'm here and I hope to find some people to talk to who will understand me or even better do the same.

Welcome...so what was you base-line MPG before & after installing that ScanGauge?

Thanks.
Years before I read a lot about saving fuel, talked to my mechanician, made experments. Just the fuel I filled in after 600 miles helped a little bit only. There were so many influences that made it impossible to realize why it was more or less.
So with this car the base-line MPG was 60, even better than the official fuel economy rating by Ford (52 MPG).
Today I had a trip of 80 miles and the car reached 79 MPG

This is exactly what I try to get across to people, but some just don't believe me. Oh well.

The clutch is one of the components that is loaded extremely more than in conventional use. Every time the engine starts (avg. once a minute) the clutch shall speed up from 0 to 1200 rpm.
Now the clutch has to be replaced after nearly 125t miles.
The previous owner used the car for 105t miles, no idea about is driving style.
When I bought this car I felt that the clutch wasn't in a good condition but it still worked fine.
Today I can't go faster than 50 mph, but that's good for saving fuel ;)
Anyhow it will be replaced within this month.

I once tried EOC in a Corolla with automatic transmission, had to put it on neutral. That was not really a good experience and I'd prefer to not try it again.