Fuel Economy, Hypermiling, EcoModding News and Forum - EcoModder.com

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Ultra-Gauge

Got the little gizmo today (Wednesday) after ordering it on Sunday. Nice package. Took one look at the windshield mounting thingie and pulled out my Leatherman. I hate suction cups. Hate 'em. I never stick crap to my windshield. Made a deep cut in the suction cup about half an inch from the center and cut a doughnut hole. Pulled out the doughnut and tossed it. So much for the warranty....

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On the Smart Car, on the dash between the speedometer and the center A/C console, is a narrow area of fabric that is exactly the width of the domed area on the suction cup base. I slid the lips of the base under the edge of the speedo housing and the console and pulled it down to the lip of the dash. Then I locked down the little lever to make it tight. It worked pretty well. Pretty solid. Very nice appearance! Absolute perfect placement, at 2 o'clock, halfway between the wheel and the dash, just above the airflow of the left center vent, couldn't ask for a better location in three dimensions. Absolutely perfect! Same color, too, as Smart black plastic. And this is weird, the LEDs are the same color as the lights on the cheapo marine radio I got from West Marine! Gotta tuck that long cord somewhere, tho. I'll try to route it through the A/C cover into the interior of the dash but the plug may be too big. If you find yourself in a high crime area, it's easy to pop the Ultra-Gauge off its 4-fingered mount with your fingernail if you drink lotsa milk, then you can tuck it into the nook just below the mount. If you don't have a Smart Car, I don't know what you'll do. Something different. Stand in the bushes with a ballpeen hammer, maybe. Specially since the thing stays on for a while after you pull the key, announcing to the world in big blue letters, "Steal me, I'm a brain puzzle for crackheads." In fact, the Ultra-Gauge would make a great practical joke for these dimwits. "Hey, dude, I'll sell you dis GPS for 20 bucks." "Dat's not a GPS!" "Yeah 'tis." "No 'taint. Lookit dah plug. Wats dat?" "I dunno. Gimme ten." "I ain't givin' ya ten. Whaddafok's it?" "I dunno. Gimme five." "I ain't givin' ya five. Whaddafok's it?" "I dunno. Somekinda stoopid GPS thing."

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The LOAD GAUGE (upper left) reads 41.2 at idle with the air conditioning on (red light, center console). The TEMP GAUGE (upper right) reads 134.6 F because the car is warming up and has been idiling for about three minutes. The INSTANTANEOUS GALLONS PER HOUR GAUGE (lower left) reads 0.3 with the a/c on. With the a/c off, it reads 0.2. The AVERAGE GPH GAUGE (lower right) reads 0,6, possibly reflecting more gas used during the cold start and a/c activation than at this stage. You can program three separate displays with four gauges each (of 49 available for the Smart Car), and page between them by either pushing a button on the back or activating the auto-paging feature. Note that I have just crashed into a residential hedgerow because I was fiddling around with the Ultra-Gauge rather than watching where I was going. Plastic cars are surprisingly resiliant!

Gently plugged it in to the watchyamacallit plug and the Ultra-Gauge lit up. Nice and bright. Really easy to read. Really a pleasant surprise. Then it gives me 49 friggin' gauges! Whaddam I gonna do with 49 friggin' gauges? It's a lot bigger than I expected. Everybody in giant gas hogs said it was smaller than they expected. I'm in a Smart Car. I do calisthenics to scratch my ass. The thing's gigantic. Glad I didn't get the Scangauge. My old eyes like the big old letters, way bigger than the letters on the speedo! Easy to read even on bumpy pavement. Easy to mess with with one hand. I think we're going to be friends.

Didn't find the rebate form as tiresome as some. Super effort went into their web site. Very classy, well laid out. The forum is a joke, tho. The one at Wayne's CleanMPG.com is a lot better. Lotsa geeky guys over here, too, who'll want to screw around with the damn thing and do rocket science on it. Same as here, most likely. My only problem was calibration. I'm trapped in a city with nowhere to go. Gotta find some highway markers. It said I was getting over 1000 MPG . Don't really give a damn about Instantaneous MPG anyway. Gave up on that for now. Much more interested in the LOAD GAUGE. Want to get down to the nuts and bolts of hypermiling. I looked at all those crazy gauges until my head was spinnin', then I stuck up the LOAD GAUGE, TEMP GAUGE, INSTANTANEOUS GPH AND AVERAGE GPH. I'm gonna play with just them for a while.

DAY 2 LOAD GAUGE... what the heck is that?
First real drive with the Ultra-Gauge. Never used a Scangauge. Never liked the looks of them. 'Fraid it might talk to me in assembly language or something green. I hate green. Reminds me of that first generation of monotone computer monitors. Got a dual pyrometer on my Jag, tho, so there. Even an Ultra-Gauge ain't that sexy.

Didn't bother with the calibration. Too much trouble. Want to mess with the load gauge. It's 85 degrees out. Just let the car idle. Load gauge says 17 at idle. Turn on the air. Thirty friggin' four. Thought so. You people who think your gonna die without A/C are driving two cars. Man up. Roll down the windows. Take your shirts off. Girls, too. Get a trucker's tan. It'll peel off after a few days.

Give it the gas. Whoa! 50 comes easy on the load gauge. Looks like Ultra-Gauge has got something to teach my pillow foot. 50's where I want to start. 50 is like near MPG nirvana. Stochiometric mix. Maybe 48, maybe 52. Somewhere in there. Probably varies. Engine geeks'l know. First we'll play around with some 200 mile trips, trying to keep the load nailed on 50 . No A/C , of course. Hypermiling ain't for sissies.

So with the A/C on, I get up to speed between lights, then pull my foot all the way off the gas for the upcoming red light. Load gauge falls off to 5. Cool. Decelleration is running the A/C and the fuel is shut off. Instantaneous gph says 0.2. I pull to a stop in neutral. 0.3 gph with the AC blasting, probably a high 0.3 because 0.4 ticks up nopw and again. I pop the A/C off, 0.2 again. Gotta remember that I can get free A/C on the mountain downhills for my next Hypermiling desert trip. Use it to resuscitate my gasping sissy passenger. (Actually, no one will ride with me. That's okay, they're all too heavy, want the windows up, take extra gas.

Speaking of weight in a Smart Car, the dang thing is so light that there are downhill stretches where I actually get better mileage with more weight. It's because of wind drag. I'll have to do a comparison one of these days. Spooky!

DAY 3 Cruising around town with the LOAD GAUGE
Driving around the busy city streets with the LOAD GAUGE really shows how a dedicated hypermiler is forced to waste gas by a buncha idiots in a mindless hurry. If I go with the flow, the LOAD GAUGE is up against 80 or 90 most of the time. You don't want to be antisocial and slow down the flow of traffic, but these people are racing to red lights and all lanes are Indy 500. On weekends or in the dead of night, its pretty obvious that I could get to the same places in about the same amount of time at half the load. And I mean I could do it easily.

People think, "Oh, that silly little car is slowing everybody down!" when I'm timing the lights. I often blow by everyone who slammed to a stop when I can find an open lane. But open lanes are hard to find. These idiots have no social consciousness about traffic sense. They'll race ahead, swerving through all lanes to be first, and frequently end up stopping in the right lane, preventing people from proceeding with right turns at the red light. And when the light turns green, they'll sit there with their heads up their butts while the cars ahead pull away, then accelerate agressively to make up for their delay, throwing off any attempt at smoothness by those behind them and forcing everyone in line to waste gas with unnecessary acceleration.

So anyway, I love this gauge already. I don't care how accurately your gauge is, if you can't use it with constant (second by second) reference in traffic, it can't really be effective. This read-out on the Ultra-Gauge is more than adequate. It's enormous. It's in your face. I mean, the way it's mounted, I see every change instantly out of the corner of my eye when I am focused on idiots trying to kill me in their daily destruction derby. There were wrecks everywhere today. I love this car. It can swerve like a jackrabbit!

The TEMP GAUGE is really sensitive. I never realized what I was missing with analog gauges (not that the Smart Car has one). The temperature readout is changing all the time. You can use it in concert with the LOAD GAUGE to get an idea of how hard your engine is working, keeping in mind that you are heating that water up with gasoline. Of course, you want to achieve and maintain an ideal temperature, probably the middle 190s for a highly-efficient car (or even hotter if you're into Carnot theory), but I was surprised that the temperature didn't hold steady like I expected. Real surprised. So when I learn new stuff like that, I've gotta integrate it into my technique. Like, what am I doing to make the temperature jump around? Isn't it better to drive in a manner that keeps the temperature changing slowly rather than quickly? Stuff like that.