New Highs in Hypermiling: 50 mpg!

I'm now driving slower than ever. Remember that I travel at a time of day when fewer cars and trucks are on the road -- I couldn't drive 50-60 mph during rush hour, but at 1 in the afternoon or 8 at night, it's not a big deal. I just have to keep an eye out for trucks bearing down on me, and when I see them, I speed up a bit and let them pass without having to slow down.

So over the past month, I've worked at maintaining an average speed of 55 mph. Using the pulse & glide technique (where I speed up to 60 and then coast back to 50, repeating ad nauseam), I've been able to achieve incredible success in stretching my gas pennies further than usual. Over the first 100 fill-ups, I averaged about 44 mpg. But over the last four tankfuls, I've managed almost 50 mpg! I keep track of my mileage at fuelly.com



This means that my average trip takes a few minutes longer each day, but that gives me a few extra minutes to listen to my audio books or to play some music. My P&G'ing keeps me more awake than when I'd drive using cruise control, and I love the car and arrive at my destination in a great mood.

Smart Car after 20,000 Miles

Well, I made it to 20K before the snow hit; who knows what's going to happen with that car in the next few months. Will I be able to drive it up our path? The highway? Time will tell. Actually, I'm most afraid of Rte 32 -- that's the only place a nasty head-on collision could occur. Ironic that the highway is much safer than a two-lane road in a rural place.

I had some electrical hiccups with Cheewawa, as I've come to call my car, and I had to take the car in recently for its 20,000-mile check-up anyway, so I was hoping that they could take care of the routine maintenance and the minor repairs at the same time. At first they thought I had a problem with one of the electrical components called a SAM, but replacing the SAM didn't help. Then they blamed the alternator. But before they put the car up on the lift again, they tested the battery and discovered that it was faulty. A simple battery change was all I needed. Now the car runs like a dream.

I'm still getting excellent mileage, tho it definitely diminishes with the decreasing temperature. Normally I get about 47 miles to a gallon, but lately I've been hovering more around 42-44. Partly this is due to the wind -- it was ferocious yesterday and for part of today, and the car had to fight just to roll down the hill.

I've added a small armrest in the car (it doesn't reach out as far as I'd like, but it adds a bit of storage) and put in a 6-CD changer, which helps with those books-on-CD, but otherwise the car is basically unmodified. My next alteration, however, is for safety: snow tires. I'm putting them on this week! Gotta have a safe Cheewawa!

Smart Car after 10,000 miles

Yes, that little car o' mine has already spun its odo to the 10,000-mile mark. Driving around 180-200 miles a day will do that for you pretty fast.

It's a bit of a pain to check the oil (theoretically -- I've never done it) because the engine is under the flap behind the seats on top of what little trunk space I have. To check the oil, I'd have to take most of the stuff out of the back, and tho the car doesn't ostensibly have enough room for a pack of cards, its actually quite spacious. Squeezed behind me are usually the following items:

29" unicycle with handlebar extention
firefighter gear (boots, bunker pants, coat, helmet)
various cycling items (hydration system, gel packs, kneepads, helmet, etc)

...as well as a few incidentals.

So I went by the owner's manual, which suggested that I only needed to change the oil every 10,000 miles. This seems like the setup to a joke, but the car has run fine with only a few hiccups along the way, none of which was oil-related.

HICCUPS
1. Door latches. In really hot weather, the doors don't always want to latch. It's their personal decision, and I respect that, but I find that they behave properly with a little coaxing, so it wasn't something for the dealer to fix when I went for my 10,000-mile checkup.
2. Headlights. They were aimed a bit too high, causing partial blindness in the drivers going the other way at night. People would flash their brights at me for apparently no reason; it took me a few weeks to figure this one out. A simple fix.
3. Brights. Speaking of brights, mine shudder on and off very strangely; this is apparently an easy fix that my dealer did NOT perform involving a loose wire. I'll wait till the 20,000-mile checkup for that one.
4. Gear shift. The shifter is a bit sticky at times, but some WD-40 may have fixed this. If not, I'll take the car in (and take care of those brights, too).

Considering that the car has averaged over 45 miles per gallon and that parking is always a breeze, I really can't complain. It has drawbacks other than its lack of a back seat, but over all I'm thrilled with it. There's no denying its cuteness factor, either.

Still Loving the Smart! Can You Say HYPERMILER?

The car has only gotten better. Or maybe I should say that the driver has only gotten better.

I've learned some hypermiling techniques, and they've paid off. My mileage the first few fillups was about 41-42 mile per gallon. My last two tanks averaged nearly 49 mpg. In fact, last week I managed to squeeze nearly 419 miles out of my 8.7-gallon tank, with about .2 gallons to spare (an average of 50.4 mpg).

Here are my hypermiling tricks:
1. Drive slowly. No car can really perform better at 70 than at 60, due to aerodynamics and other reasons, so I drive at a steady 55-63 mph, pretty much. I think my average speed these days is about 57 mph on the highway. Hypermilers say that this can improve gas mileage like nothing else, and in my old car, I saw that this was definitely the case. I think that driving 70 costs 15-20% of your fuel efficiency compared with driving 60 mph. I think I'd drive 50 mph if I could, but that's almost dangerously slow, so I'll stick near 60. I won't mind when highways go back to a 55 mph speed limit.

2. Avoid using the brakes. I let the car slow itself down whenever possible, and I leave space before the car in front of me when I'm in any kind of traffic. The smart car's engine slows itself down as soon as your foot's off the gas pedal, and the deceleration is pretty strong because the car actually has an automated manual transmission -- it's like a stick-shift that does the shifting automatically. I've had trips from Manhattan to New Paltz where I used the brakes a total of three times.

3. Avoid hard accelerations, too. I like the advice that you should drive as tho there is an egg under the pedal. I read that the smart car has the slowest acceleration of any American car. Well, that makes my job easier! It just means I have to be careful when entering traffic to leave enough room behind me that I don't need to 'gun it.'

4. Draft when possible. I usually don't get to do this on account of point #1, but when a slow truck lumbers along, I'll sometimes keep up with it, watching my ScanGauge to make sure that the drafting is actually working (and it is, but it's still a bit hard to believe).

5. Drive other than in the center of the lane. This is some advice I read on a hypermiler site. I'm not sure if it's true or whether it makes a significant difference, but the idea is that the lane tends to wear out in the area where most cars drive, so you will do better by driving a bit left or right of that line.

6. Air in the tires! Make sure your tires are properly inflated. Some hypermilers even over-inflate theirs, but I'm not going to risk it in my tiny car -- the tires are small and hard enough as it is!

Smart Observations, Week 3

I'm still loving the car, three weeks and over 3,000 miles into owning it.

IT'S (NOT) A GAS
My average fuel economy has been around 42-43 miles per gallon. That's pretty impressive considering that about 15% of my driving is done around New Paltz, where the mileage is 'only' about 40 mpg.

Thanks to a wonderful forum for Smart Car owners (http://www.smartcarofamerica.com/forums/), I've learned a really good trick to add a few MPGs when I'm driving on the highway: drafting. I find some big truck that's driving at about my speed and I keep no closer than 100 feet or so. The effect isn't tremendous because of that distance (drafting 10 feet back saves about 40% of the gas), but I'd rather be safe (and save only 10%) by staying further away.

YOU CAN STUFF IT!

I've managed to fit a surprising amount into the car. Right now, the car is loaded with my fire fighting gear, a unicycle, a few shopping bags, a bike helmet and a bike pump, and a good deal of cycling equipment... and there's still plenty of room! I'm driving to Portland, ME next week for a unicycle race, so I tested whether I could get both of my big unicycles into the car at the same time. The answer: Yes, with plenty of space to spare.

PARKING
I love it when I'm about to pull out of a tiny spot in Manhattan and someone pulls up in a normal car to ask if I'm leaving; then they see how little space they'll have, and they just drive away frustrated.

Smart Cars make Minis and Beetles look enormous. Basically, a Smart Car is like a Bug minus the rear seat and trunk. That's the difference between a mini-car and a micro. This photo shows how much longer a VW Beetle is compared with my tiny car. The bug is nearly four feet longer.

OK, Maybe More Like 43 MPG

I'm still playing with my little ScanGauge, but I forgot to make an adjustment to it that has had a significant effect on my mileage readouts.

After correcting for the amount of fuel actually put into the car, the ScanGauge seems to reflect more accurately the amount of miles I'm actually getting per gallon. I'm basing this on my careful record-keeping. Most recently I filled up 8.5 gallons after driving 368 miles, and that comes to about 43.3 mpg. Keep in mind that this reflects a combination of highway driving (maybe 80-85% of my driving), New Paltz driving (9-14%) and parking space driving in Manhattan (1%). I'm quite happy with this mileage.

It will be interesting to see how the car does when I drive round-trip to Nova Scotia in a few weeks. That should give some great information about the car's highway-only performance.

I should also note that I really drive like a gas-miser. I maintain a speed between 55 and 62 mph, and I sometimes draft behind big trucks (but not TOO close). I even put the car into neutral on big downhills once in a while. And I give the car high-octane gasoline, as the manufacturer suggests.

50 MPG!

Well, I managed to hit 50 miles per gallon on today's round-trip into Manhattan and back.

Since the drive into NYC is a bit slanted down as you head in, the mileage is better in that direction. In my Aztek, I managed to hit 33 mpg on one of my last trips in by maintaining a speed of about 60 mph. On the way back, however, I couldn't do much better than 27 or 28 mpg in that car.

The Smart Car, on the other hand, is so light and fuel-efficient that it would be hard to drive it fast enough to get such bad mileage. In general, it gets about 35-40 miles on a city gallon (assuming by 'city' that one means 'New Paltz'). And on the highway it does extremely well, generally scoring in the mid-40s for people who aren't leadfoots.

But I'm a feather-foot. I don't drive as fast as 65 mph, even, and rarely even crack 60. As a result, my mileage is amazing. On the way into NYC today, I reached 52 mpg even tho the last mile was a fairly steep uphill in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. As I drove into Manhattan later, my mileage was still in the high 40s for the short trip. And on the way back to New Paltz, I again kept my speed about 60 mpg and found that my mileage was 48 mpg, for an average on the day of about 50 miles to the gallon! In fact, the round-trip 170 miles used only about 3 gallons of gas, which is a lot less than the 6 gallons I'd use in the Aztek. At this rate, the car will save me about $60 a week!