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Using Anti-Road Rage to Save Money
By Jonathan | May 26, 2008 at 10:21 am
If you are above the age of 16 you probably have noticed that gas prices have been steadily increasing up to the gouging price of $4/gallon. I can’t really do anything myself to control the prices, but what I can do is control my driving habits to increase the gas mileage I do get after spending $40 at the pump.
First things first: 90% of the people that read this blog on a regular basis personally know me. They probably know that I like computers, I work for a computer software company, and I’m working on my second computer-related degree. In fact, they may classify me as a computer nerd.
Way back when before I could even drive, my parents would more or less keep track of the gas mileage that their cars would get on each tank. Nothing too crazy…simply reset the odometer each time they pumped a full tank of gas, divide trip distance by gallons pumped and booya, instant mpg. After that the number was used only as a reference for subsequent fuel ups.
About a year ago I decided to start tracking this data in Excel. Each time I filled up I would record the number of miles driven on that tank of gas, as well as the number of gallons pumped. Excel would then keep a tally of the miles per gallon achieved on that tank, average miles per gallon overall, total number of miles traveled, average number of miles driven per day, etc. Nerd, yes, fine.
Most of my driving is done on the highway. I have a ~30 mile commute on Tuesday/Thursday, and a ~20 mile commute on Monday/Wednesday/Friday. About a month ago I decided to perform a little experiment. I decided to drive the speed limit when on the highway…
Note to Mom: I actually always drive the speed limit, no matter where I am
Note to everyone else: I usually drive about 70-75 on the highway
Performing this not-completely-scientific experiment on my last four tanks of gas has produced some interesting results. I have been able to drive an extra 55 miles on each tank (401 miles up from 346), and have increased my average miles per gallon by about 4.9. (38.9mpg up from 34.0mpg) This basically saves me almost two gallons of gas from my previous driving habits, allowing me to wait longer between fill ups. Personally, I was very surprised at the difference that this made, but maybe I shouldn’t be. Everyone knows the faster you go, the worse the fuel efficiency gets.
The hardest part about this whole thing is staying relaxed in the right lane on the highway. I’m usually that guy speeding around some slow driver…now I’m the slow driver that everyone is speeding around. Is it worth it? Perhaps. What I really need to do is buy a house closer to work. That would solve a whole slew of problems. 
Besides, I’ve only gotten the finger once.
Topics: driving | 8 Comments »
May 26th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
Did I inspire you to check your gas consumption? Let me apologize for my posts. I’ve been experimenting with mobile blogger (shmucks like me need to rely on google services) and using jott. Though I wanted to let you know I successfully set up a wifi network in our home. Booyah.
May 27th, 2008 at 6:09 am
No, you are not responsible for me getting goofy with my gas mileage. My car gets pretty good mpgs to begin with, and for a while I’ve wanted to stretch it out to see just how good it could get. $3.99/gallon gave me a good reason to play around. It’s really turned into a game for me now.
May 27th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
I was all ready to support you in your study, but the Excel sheet took it a step to far to nerdom. My parent’s new fancy shmancy car does real time mpg calcs while driving. My mom recently started paying attention to this (as we all have, right?) and found that on her 30 mile drive through the FLAT land of NWOH, the moment she goes over 60mph her mpg$ plummet-in lieu of an Excel doc, this hit the same point home.
Cool kids ride the bus.
Burn calories not gas.
May 27th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
The Chevy HHR that we rented in Florida did the realtime MPGs also. I played with this a little bit and even though the car drove like a box on wheels, I found that turning the A/C on subtracted about 1-2mpg, while drafting from the car in front of me added about 1-2mpg. I didn’t do any tests with the windows down or anything crazy like that…but I found the drafting to be rather intesting. Another thing that helped was maintaining a constant speed, ie, using the cruise control. Throttling up/down on the gas really hurts.
Oh, and the Excel document is sweet…don’t knock it ’til you try it!
May 28th, 2008 at 8:40 am
The Mythbusters already started the research on your windows down vs a/c (http://mythbusters-wiki.discovery.com/page/Keeping+the+Car+Cool)
May 28th, 2008 at 8:51 am
I disagree that this myth is really busted. For their test they were only driving 45mph. Everything I’ve heard is once you get going above 45 (like on the highway, 55/65/75) things start getting worse.
This is actually one myth that I thought they screwed up on.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:08 am
So….speaking as an Engineer married to a Business major – wouldn’t excel be less nerdy and more like a B-School cop-out? I mean, think of the data mining you could do if you set up a SQL database and wrote some perl scripts. Excel is for managers and physics majors…
May 28th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Oh and Jon the tailgate myth is crap too. I’ve tried it on both of my trucks and they both get better mpg with the tailgate down. That show is stupid!