Driving Greener

Hi, Nitz! Rick sent this to me. So good to "see" you after all these years.

I am so proud of you.

I work for this show and website, 4REAL and 4REAL.com that is all about inspiring people to create positive social change. Go ahead and post your video on the site. Let's keep in touch. peace, Shar

PS: I'm in Vancouver now. :)

One thing I think would be helpful is to clarify further what I meant by "accelerate and brake gently", which led to my best mileage of 45MPG.

It sounds self explanatory, but a key thing to note is I'm trying to stabilize my engine's load, not the speed. Since I don't have cruise control, I found that manually controlling the speed might actually have been what gave me that extra performance increase.

To clarify, using cruise control keeps you at the speed I choose, increasing the fuel to the engine when the car goes up a hill, decreasing when going down a hill. What I found works more efficiently is to try to keep the load on the engine constant. Having the ScanGaugeII helps a lot here.

When I go up a hill, I might find my speed drops few MPH to prevent the increase in load on the engine. When I go down a hill, I will speed up, taking advantage of the hill, and usually spending that speed increase on the next uphill segment.

You'll find that if you want to really push the limits of this, you have to pay very close attention to your driving, which probably isn't a bad thing anyway :)