What's Behind your Motivation to get High MPG?
 

- Some of us want to "stick it to the oil companies".
- Some of us feel good saving money at the pump.
- Some of us do it for the environment.

I'm a competitive sort. So, to me, getting high MPG is a game. I try to see if I can hack my driving-style to get better MPG than the last tank.

Doug
Oakland, California

All of the above and none of the above?

Can efficiency as a general philosophy be a motivation?

Like you, it's also an enjoyable game for me.

3 cents a mile sums it up nicely.

regards
mech

Bragging rights :D

It helps to have a diesel.

Bragging rights :D

It helps to have an Insight

Honestly, it gives me something fun to do on my boring commute through dead-flat central Florida and saves me some money at the same time

Reduce petroleum consumption, leave a smaller carbon footprint, save money, feel superior to slobs. The whys and hows and the science and techniques are fascinating to me; an odd combination of gearhead and environmentalist. :thumbup:

Bragging rights? I had forgotten THAT one. I do take pleasure from the reaction when I tell people I got 55.47mpg on my way to LA with my 26 y/o car. That's better than the average Prius driver/owner. (present company excluded, of course)

This is a win thread!

For me, it was originally to save money alone. Over time, it has evolved for fun and the challenge of getting not good, but exceptional fuel economy. I still love telling people I saved close to $1000 last year on fuel :D

The bragging rights!

It helps to have a car with low EPA Combined mpg and great potential :thumbup:

Above all, it just seems to be the right thing to do for ourselves and future drivers. The benefits are numerous!

So many reasons!
Saving money - fuel cost roughly cut in half
Smaller footprint
Bragging rights - currently #4!
It's a fun challenge to drive efficiently
Modifying cars is fun
Less refueling stops

Smaller footprint.

And bragging rights. Oh god the bragging rights. The groans from friends on Facebook when I post numbers up. :D

It's a fun hobby. Considering I can't practice drifting (fingers crossed our new series starts next year), slalom/circuit racing or drag racing on the street, hypermiling is the only motorsports discipline I can enjoy on a daily basis.

Completely agree Niky.
I used to road race cars, carts and motorcycles and found many of the same skills transfer over. Going to work and back from work is now like a mini race. Brake late, watch and determine other cars moves, high cornering speeds etc..

I hate to say it but actually have as much fun in my 05 Insight as my 2010 Camaro. Main reason: having fun in Camaro draws a lot of attention and tickets.
Insight: you just blend in and know one knows the're passing a car that is getting 4x the mpg they are getting.

I always say, "Life is HOW one frames it." You say "hypermiling is a motorsport". I never thought of it THAT way, but that's a great perspective.

While all our driving conditions are unique to each of us and it's fun to compare our MPG postings with others in similar cars, each tank refill really begins another competition NOT with others but with ourselves.

Fun thread so far!

Efficiency is my game. I monitor and tune large computer systems for work, Have done quite a bit of autocrossing, Do a bunch of bike riding, etc... It's always about squeezing that last bit of performance/efficiency out of everything I do.

Cheers!
LitterBug

I wonder. Do you think, in a galaxy far, far away, space aliens brag how they were able to reach earth and return home on fewer dilithium crystals?

Engine-off coasting all the way? Going to be a pretty long commute.

Primary reason is that I just plain like small cars. You can pretty much draw a straight line from the neighbor's MG-TC that I lusted after as a kid, through the Austin-Healey, Sunbeam Alpine, and others that were my first cars, to the CRX and the Insight that replaced it. I admit that it's not purely about efficiency: there were a good few motorcycles in there, and if I didn't have a couple of dogs that go most places with me, I'd probably have a Miata or Lotus.

Then there are the environmental and geopolitical benefits. Saving money, though nice, is probably low on my personal list.

Yeah. Space aliens are learning to get by with less by reading our Ecomodder comments.

When's the last time you saw a flying saucer with side view mirrors? And, now they're SO good at front grill blocking that you don't even know where the front grill begins and ends!

I do it for the ladies.

I love driving.

Sometimes I do it BECAUSE of the ladies!:eek:

I like oil companies, and I think the environment is doing just fine.

I'm (slowly) building a land speed car. Most improvements to a car to make it more fuel efficient will also give it a higher top speed.

As an engineer, maximizing efficiency is an interesting goal to pursue, and it saves money at the pump when I try for the best fuel efficiency.

Sometimes efficiency is getting the farthest out of a gallon of gas, other times it is getting the most power out of the engine, sometimes it is getting the most speed out of your available power. Consequently, not all of my decisions end up giving me the highest fuel economy.

You LIKE oil companies? You're lucky Ecomodder doesn't have a "Vote Them Off the Island" feature. :)

I was going to make a joke about a giant pulse & glide.

But that's probably not the way they'd do it: instead, accelerate half way there, turn the ship around and burn fuel to decelerate the rest of the way. Not P&G!

There's nothing quite like forced frugality.

Well, I guess slave labor or imprisonment... :mad:

Well, most of the things we use, from the food we eat to the goods we buy to the buildings we live and work in, are almost completely dependent on oil companies, whether that's in the form of chemical fertilizers or diesel for trucks and tractors or petroleum products such as plastics and asphalt. I don't necessarily like oil companies, any more than I like any other companies, but I appreciate the quality of life they have made possible.

That said, I'm trying to minimize my dependence on them, both because of the environmental havoc we all wreak and the immediate monetary costs. I started hypermiling to save money on gas, but quickly realized that driving that way is also more interesting.

Okay. In THAT case, I'll change my vote.

And I'm pretty sure most people in our lifestyle are not trying to over compensate for certain physical short comings, unlike some that drive big jacked up coal rollers that never haul or tow anything:D

The coolest alien navigators calculate the voyage time spent using the P&P&P (pulse & pivot & pulse) method. Then they calculate shorter pulses with a glide in the middle, factoring in the higher acceleration that a lower fuel load will allow.

A good-sized solar sail should allow you to save fuel on braking... Or you could use the solar wind collected by the sail at your destination for reverse thrust.

Gonna need an incredible amount of fuel to do the pulse-pivot-pulse with continuous thrust throughout the trip.

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Christmastime is always a bummer for me. Christmas traffic and cold weather mean no more high mileage trips. I've just seen 3.5 km/l (about 8 mpg) in city driving for the first time in years. None of my short-cuts worked. I had to endure half-an-hour of traffic just to go a single mile. (The highway leg after was better, but given I had a diesel, I was not happy getting a mere 30 mpg on that leg and 12 mpg overall. :( )

Ho ho ho. Time to break out the bicycles.

Okay. Since everyone is getting serious about saving fuel between galaxies...

Why waste the fuel to slow down? Can't we just re-enter the atmosphere, use the air friction drag, and simply glow red hot for just a few hours?

Well, if you have enough mass to absorb that heat, you'd have too much mass to decelerate enough before you run out of atmosphere.

I drive as efficiently as possible to save energy, to reduce my contribution to changing the climate.

Actually used for space probes - see aerobraking. Problem is that at interstellar speeds, you run out of atmosphere before speed, and either go zipping past or have an opportunity to perform lithobraking :-)

I really don't get all that good mileage. But I'm air-cooled so I get infinite miles per gallon of antifreeze. Antifreeze is poisonous to puppies and kittens.

I like to imagine I'm a happy little air molecule, when along come a Superbeetle, it's nose to the ground buzzing like an angry hornet. Someday soon it will be an silent Arcimoto SRK.

It's funny the thread runs to interstellar reach.

In order of priority for me:

1. Energy efficiency
2. Sustainability
3. Interesting/Fun Engineering/Science

- - - - - - - -

As for interstellar travel ..

I don't expect any society technologically advanced enough to be able to do it .. to have any interest in doing it .. in the classical sense anyway .. I only see 2 possible exceptions .. and in any event absolutely no interest in us at all.

#1> Whole Society in Generation Ships:
If your species / society survives for enough billions of years .. in order to continue to survive you would eventually have to turn to at least generation ships .. but these don't need to 'travel' any faster than just slowly getting to the next resource extraction site every couple billion years or so ... sit at the new resource collection site for a few billions years before eventually taking a few billion more years to travel to the next ... etc .. no FTL space ships zipping around is ever needed nor desired.

#2> Dark Energy Drive:
The gist of the theory of dark energy is that empty space itself contains a form of energy and applies a negative pressure (ie a push/expansion of the space-time itself) .. it's one explanation for the accelerating expansion of the observable universe .. Relativity's Speed of Light limit doesn't apply to the movement (expansion) of space-time itself .. Instead of a 'Warp Drive' which has to spend very large amounts of energy to bend/warp the existing space-time .. a Dark Energy Drive .. consumes/converts the space in front of it (as an energy source) .. and in so doing there is then less space (ie distance) in front of that object ... In this way traveling long interstellar distance doesn't 'cost' you energy at all .. it gathers / extracts energy ... the further you travel the more energy you can gather .. the faster you go the faster you can gather more energy .. Dark Energy is estimated to be the largest energy source in all of the observable universe.

Dark Energy is an illusion caused by misinterpreting the causes of red-shift.

Scientists now admit that there are plasma portals that open between the Sun and the Earth (every 8 minutes?) that allow particles to tunnel through the normal Solar wind.

As above so below; there will be similar portals that operate on interstellar and intergalactic scales. So it will be like the bodies zipping through transparent intestines like in Galaxy Quest or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. One of those, or both.

That would be another... ie 2nd

And a 3rd .. Is that even if the redshifts are interpreted correctly .. ie far away objects are moving away from us at an accelerating rate .. even then .. DarkEnergy is still only one explanation for the cause of that acceleration .. there are other explanations that don't require any DarkEnergy at all.

etc.

Yes .. Astrophysicist don't just use redshifts alone ... but the other methods used , also have the same kinds of alternatives described above as well...

DarkEnergy is one popular explanation that has been offered .. Not my own personal choice .. but it is one of several offered possible explanations.

Becuase I like to play with cars and usually ecomodding costs much less than modifying my other car to go fast. So it scratches my wrench itch and hopefully puts a few more pennies in my pocket in the process.

Save fuel in one car to buy go-fast parts for the other :)

Mine would be the Electric Universe theory. The Suspicious0bservers/thunderbolts.info crowd. Because it's predictive—things like the flash of white light when they impacted a copper slug into that comet—and the supporting evidence from the oldest petroglyphs in the world.
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Driving efficiently maximizes the return on the parts I put into my weekly driver.