Round Trip With A Prius And Trailer

[slowmover]

1). Constant speed with no lane changes. Cruise control for consistency. (A scale ticket from a CAT SCALE gives info against future runs. Baseline).

2). All stops planned in advance; rest area break at 2-hour mark. Minimum 1-hour for midday lunch (or after 4-6/hours max).

3). Traffic density increases after 1100 and is high until at least 2100. Avoiding that period means lowest friction. I start between 0200 & 0500 most days for this reason among some others.

4). Record number of braking & accel events. From a stop or extra-slow traffic.

5). Record vehicle run time. From daily start to finish. Gives Average MPH.

6). Shortest route is not best route in many instances. Lowest traffic density wins.

7). As the day progresses, fine motor skills decline. Faster decline with bad roads, traffic & weather.

Next to no one (here and similar forums, not Truckers I know) is very unlikely to maintain consistency the full day. BUT THATS WHERE THE MONEY IS (reproducible results).

Thus, 58-mph best for “economy”, but 62-mph in a 70-mph or higher zone works better.

Were your rig mine I’d have a random-pattern amber LED Flasher on the trailer top/rear. Keep the brain-dead stupids moving along. (Same for a VERY bright single brake light on that trailer).

IOW, it’s not the absolute number for the trip. It’s that the same trip numbers can be reproduced easily. FE is about being able to predict.


And THAT is via a “trip plan”. Trip starts today and finishes tomorrow evening? Where will I be at 1415 tomorrow? I can tell you. If you can do this (always be within 10-minutes of that plan), THEN the FE numbers start to make sense.

The rest is perfect seat posture (no “reaching”), perfect mirror angles, perfectly clean glass I/O, and tires to vehicle manufacturers spec for that loading (CAT Scale ticket).

Leave out the stunt driving. Cruise always on, and staying maximum distance from other traffic (the morons form packs). Rest breaks on your side of road. Early start. Early stop. And a trip that anyone else could perform given your written script.

Traffic management is what separates boys from men. If EVER outside of metro traffic (75-miles from city center) you find yourself surrounded front, sides and rear by other traffic you’ve managed an AN EXTRA HIGH-RISK FAIL.

You may not often need to slow to get other traffic around you at 62-mph. Bjt watch what they do and how they do it. Racing ahead of you at a lane closure. Jumping in front to make an immediate exit. (Pattern recognition). Keep the lane center. It’s important as some will unconsciously glide towards you if you move right (fixed distance separation by morons; incapable of required Visio-spatial skills and not capable above 45-mph).

If you’ll let this be the guide for the day (vehicle spacing) let the vehicle computer run the drivetrain. You (I tell truck drivers I’m training) are there to provide steering & braking inputs. That’s it.

It’s enough to occupy the day. Leave the drivetrain to itself.

Fleet average my company is almost 8.0 with a 40k load. I can hit nearly nine consistently (I’m not alone). Short of other details, the above is how I do it at the same AVERAGE speed. (200-tractor fleet. Over a year, the difference would be $700k annually. Now imagine a mega-carrier with 15,000-tractors).

The FE stuntmasters focus on what is NOT the target. Boys. The same ones who claim high skill level, yet can’t master a plan. (Could never be a Pilot, for instance). Monkey skills have no meaning. Every human has some. Only difference is an achingly-small degree of difference.

Your record of accel/brake events against average speed is the focus for FE. What’s grist for the mill the next trip. Otherwise, it’s in having a friction-free, low-risk trip. Only the plan survives the trip. The template.

And adherence isn’t easy. Maybe 10 of every 25 truck drivers are capable of 50% cruise control use against engine hours. (Fuel bonus could be $500 or more per quarter). Etc. Truck industry is serious about FE.

Good luck.

.

[oil pan 4]

Any scrap yard can weigh your vehicle too.

[Angel And The Wolf]

Yes, it will be an attempt to decrease CDA (with a boat tail trailer and gap filler panels to create a straight line single aerodynamic unit) to combat the increased rolling resistance. Hoping they will balance out.

[Angel And The Wolf]

The Design:

[skyking]

they will more than pay off in a dirty rig; you have a tougher time, as the prii have lower than average CD. I bet you can make it a wash, nonetheless.

[redpoint5]

Why is a trailer needed? I'd put a hitch mounted rack on the back and try my best to hide it behind the car.

[skyking]

If you can get reattachment which is always the goal, then you can see a significant reduction in CDA. What the trailer does is it affords a little more time lengthwise to get some reattachment of the flow.

[Angel And The Wolf]

Chyange of design. I'm giving up on the 25 cu ft plywood trailer box, and going for this 20 cu ft X Cargo mounted backwards on the Ironton 40 x 48 steel trailer. with a triangular plywood toolbox between the ball and the front of the cargo box to direct in-between airflow away from the blunt front of the cargo box.

[slowmover]

There’s a gravel protector for a towed car (as behind motorhomes) that is essentially an open-weave fabric. Like a horizontal sail. Underneath latest contraption envisioned would work well.

Blue Ox
Protect A Tow
Kar Gard

There’s at least one or more posts about this elsewhere.

[Fat Charlie]

Originally Posted by slowmover

The FE stuntmasters focus on what is NOT the target. Boys. The same ones who claim high skill level, yet can’t master a plan. (Could never be a Pilot, for instance). Monkey skills have no meaning. Every human has some. Only difference is an achingly-small degree of difference.

Yet that's the world all nonprofessional drivers have to deal with: driving for the rest of us isn't our full time job, it's what we have to do to get to our jobs. I know how to get from home to work with minimum gas burned, but I don't start work at 4:00 am and other realities keep me from getting there that early and waiting. If our lives let us pick days, times and routes like "serious" drivers, most of us wouldn't be driving, period. Commuters don't get to pick start or end times in much of a meaningful way, but hypermilers apply the same attention to their part time job of commuting that they do to their full time jobs. They develop and apply those monkey skills into habits and reflexes that can easily reproduce efficiency deep inside the very traffic that you make it a requirement to avoid. Because we don't get to avoid it.

My commute was the same from 2003 to early 2018, and when I came here in 2011 my first tank testing these monkey skills brought me from a 20-22 mpg "normal" up to 28. Over more than 41,000 logged miles miles, those monkey skills took an EPA rated 19 mpg car to an average of 29.7 mpg- in conditions that your entire plan is built to avoid.

As to letting the drivetrain drive, in the rough conditions you can avoid but we can't, a drivetrain can't do the driving because it can't see conditions and predict needs. Building skills that can be applied anywhere isn't a stunt, it's a necessity.