{"id":528,"date":"2008-07-07T04:32:48","date_gmt":"2008-07-07T08:32:48","guid":{"rendered":"\/blog\/?p=528"},"modified":"2008-07-07T04:32:48","modified_gmt":"2008-07-07T08:32:48","slug":"best-tank-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=528","title":{"rendered":"Best Tank Ever"},"content":{"rendered":"

With gas prices so high, there’s even more reasons to try to get the most fuel economy out of your car. Tonight I had my best tank ever, 6.36 L\/100 km<\/strong> (37 MPG). I was driving back to London and was in no particular hurry, so I “drafted” (note that I always leave at least <\/em>3, usually 4 seconds of reaction time\/distance between me and a truck, so I’m not really close enough for drafting to have much more than a few percent boost — though every bit counts, and the trucks help set a “pace”) a truck up to about Guelph around 105-110 km\/h. Shortly after that I got stuck in a bit of a construction backlog as the 401 went down to one lane, so there was a fair bit of cruising at 60 km\/h. The second half of the trip I decided to just set the cruise control at 95 km\/h and blast the stereo, but not the A\/C. It was just cool enough out to get by with just the regular fan. My car is rated for 10.2\/8.1 L\/100 km (23\/29 MPG), so to beat that is pretty good. My overall average, which you can see on my GreenHybrid database page<\/a>, is 8.5 L\/100 km — damned winter & city driving pulling the average up (where up is bad). If I can keep getting that kind of mileage on my London-Toronto runs, I’d save $11.80 for each round trip compared to my average mileage… though the slower driving would cost me about 36 minutes. With gas prices where they are, I think it’s probably a good return on my time.<\/p>\n

So the constant, moderate speed on a pretty flat drive really helps contribute to getting the most out of the car. These days you can’t read 3 webpages without tripping across hypermiling tips, so I won’t get into any of the obvious ones, except to say that I keep my tires slightly hard at 40 PSI. The tips often say to keep your tires “properly inflated”, but the ideal pressure is usually some compromise between the figure given by your car manufacturer on the door jamb — in my case, 32 PSI, which is a compromise value between ride comfort and fuel economy — and the max sidewall rating of the tire, 51 PSI for my Nokian WRs.<\/p>\n

Perhaps not too strangely, the fastest two vehicles I saw tonight were both SUVs, both tailgating and doing about 140 when they got an open patch of road. The cost of gas is nothing when you have a giant truck!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With gas prices so high, there’s even more reasons to try to get the most fuel economy out of your car. Tonight I had my best tank ever, 6.36 L\/100 km (37 MPG). I was driving back to London and was in no particular hurry, so I “drafted” (note that I always leave at least […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}