Are you only removing the crossmembers or also the rails? I removed the crossmembers on my Forester, but I believe that removing the rails required dropping the headliner, and everyone recommended against it.
Are your crossmembers aerodynamically-shaped? The ones on my Forester were. I do not know how much surface drag they added when attached to a brick, but I probably removed ten pounds, so there is that. If you can remove the rails, that would probably be another ten pounds.
A boat tail should increase fuel economy 10%. I believe that we had at least one member that built one for a van, but it was big!
Body pans should increase fuel economy 5%, but are challenging to fabricate, and they only seem to last a year or two before requiring repair or a version 2.0.
Grill blocks and air dams are easy. It can be as simple as stuffing pipe insulation into the grill and screwing lawn edging to the bottom of the bumper, which can look surprisingly good. I screwed a coroplast rectangle into my front license plate holes and had a grill block, although it did not look great. MetroMPG made one without drilling into the car. He cut a piece of coroplast to extend forward through the grill and then screwed the grill block to that.
I have gorilla tape covering my grills.
I recognize a more temporary method!
On my Civic I replaced the coroplast and lawn edging with rolled plastic. I thought that it looked fine, but I put about fifteen holes in my bumper, which grew over time, until the screws kept coming out. I will have a version 3.0 some time after I replace the head gasket.
Members love smooth wheel covers. If you have hubcaps, several members stretched t-shirt fabric over theirs, soaked it in fiberglass resin, and were happy with the result. Others cut coroplast circles and have various fastening methods.
Maybe you will think of a novel way and impress everyone.
The classic method is with moon discs, but the classic attachment method involves screwing them into the edge of the rim. The only problems that I have heard were of the screws coming out of the holes, which results in some runaway wheel covers. Many members mount pizza pans, but I insist on being different. I bought pizza separators!
Wheel skirts are also popular. If you have not picked up yet, members' preferred material is coroplast, and Geo Metropolis introduced us to sign vinyl, which often closely matches the car paint, so it could look pretty good.
Removing the roof rack (cross members) will make a difference, but if it is 1%, that would be statistical noise, but Metro created a few threads where he did fifteen quick things like wheel covers, grill block, etc., and increased fuel economy about 15%.
It adds up!
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