It doesn’t matter what kind of car you drive, there are plenty of ways for you to improve your gas mileage, whether it’s a Prius, a Hummer, or somewhere in between:
- Avoid fast starts.
- Use cruise control on the highway.
- Drive the speed limit. On average, driving every 5 mph over is like paying another 10 cents per gallon.
- Keep your engine tuned up and working properly.
- Share a ride when you can.
- Bundle your errands and never run just one at a time.
- When running errands, park your car and walk from one errand to another.
- Keep your tires properly inflated.
Image courtesy of the Mazda website. Recycla drives a Mazda 3 and gets 24 mpg (city), 37 (highway), and 31(lifetime average).
Speaking of keeping your tires inflated properly…the next time you replace your tires, opt to have them filled with nitrogen instead of air. It sounds like a bunch of hooey, but it works. The nitrogen won’t seep out like air will and your tires will stay better inflated. You will get better gas mileage AND your tires will last longer. (Places such as Costco now offer this option for about $5/tire.)
Here’s a website that’s got the scientific details:
http://www.innovativebalancing.com/Nitrogen.htm
(The home site is hawking their service, but it’s the most detailed non-PhD-jargon version of how the nitrogen works.)
Living “rural” as I do, I’ve always planned our errands to be efficient, more as a time-saving tool. But I do save loads of gas because we go out in “clusters” instead of randomly going here and there.