Change your driving habits and save on fuel

Motorweek did an interesting test. They took 2 identical Chrysler 300C with the big 5.7l Hemi engine and cylinder cut-off technology. They are rated at 18 mpg city and 24 mpg highway. They had those cars driven by two drivers with very different driving style. One was driving very aggressively, over the speed limit, stopping and accelerating, braking hard, accelerating hard, etc.. The other one drove like his mother was in the car.

As you expect their fuel mileage differed:

1) Driving 30 miles on rural country roads

Aggressive driving: 17.6 mpg
Conservative driving: 18.4 mpg
Difference : 4% savings

2) Highway driving

Aggressive driving: 17.0 mpg
Conservative driving: 24.4 mpg
Difference : 43% savings!!!

This is very impressive. It just demonstrates that driving faster a highway speed consumes a lot more fuel than driving slower.


3) Stop and go city driving

Aggressive driving: 17.1 mpg
Conservative driving: 19.5 mpg
Difference : 14% savings

The video is available here at fueleconomy.gov where you can also find the rate fuel consumption for every car sold in the US.

Conclusion: If you want to save on fuel, hold your horses!

Water for Gas or HHO

Today I discovered this company: Green Machine Solutions

They created a device that produces HHO gas, aka as Brown Gas, from distilled water. Once this device is installed in your car, it improves your fuel economy by up to 60%. The way it works is that you basically put water in a jar containing electrodes connected to your car's battery. When running, the electrodes convert water to an hydrogen and oxygen gas (HHO). The HHO gas is then sent through you car's air intake and is burned at the same time a gas. Since HHO contains hydrogen, your car requires less fuel to run hence the fuel economy.

There is a tv news station (wptv) that is testing their claim. They will have the final test done by July 9th. I will be posting their results. Stay tuned!

Some of my skeptic friends tell me that if something like that really worked that automakers would have made cars with a similar device included. I deeply believe that big corporations don't have all the answers and that regular joes or smaller companies beat big corporations at innovation all the time. Just look at this article about this teen who made a plastic grocery bag decompose in 3 months instead of the thousands of years it takes in nature.

If you find that an Hydro-4000 is expensive, you can also go the DIY route with Water4Gas.

My fingers are crossed.

Want to improve your fuel economy - slow down!

I am sure it is not news for anybody but the slower you go on the highway the less gas you will consume, but it is always nice to see an actual chart.

Here it is from this website:If you drive 60mph instead of 80, and you drive a BMW 535i, your fuel economy improves by 25%.

Hypermilling

From the website

Hypermiling, or driving your car “in a manner that maximizes mileage,”.

Change some of your driving habits and you will reap benefits right away!

Give it a try!

Save Gas

I found a maker of spark plugs that claims that their spark plug can increase fuel economy by 2 to 13% depending on the car. The company is Enerpulse.

They have created a new kind of spark plug that create sparks that are 10 times stronger than regular spark plugs. The way it works is that they use a capacitor to accumulate current before the spark, much like a flash on a camera, and then when the spark fires, it is a lot stronger. This means a more thorough combustion with less unburned fuel. On top of that, they claim that you get more horsepower and more torque at the same time.

This is an excerpt of what they mention on their website:

This new technology is a drop-in replacement for all spark plugs, including those iridium, high performance spark plugs. Pulstar is designed to more efficiently ignite the fuel in an engine's cylinders increasing fuel economy, horsepower and torque. Pulstar™ pulse plugs look and fit like spark plugs, but incorporate an internal capacitor to deliver a spark 10 times more powerful than a spark plug with less cycle-to-cycle variation.

One of my friends is an electrical engineer and when I told him about this company's spark plug, he told me that one concern he had was that their plug could change the timing of the car since the spark plug accumulate current before firing and may then fire a little bit later than with regular spark plugs.

I sent an email to Enerpulse to ask them about that:

A colleague of mind, who is an electrical enginering, mentions that the capacitor your put in your plug might delay the time at which the plug sparks and thus alter the timing of the engine. As you mention in your site, a regular spark plug heats up a little bit for 5 millionth of a second before sparking. With your capacitor plug, how long does it accumulate the charge before sparking? If it is longer than the time it takes a regular plug before it sparks, then that could potentially make your plug spark later in the process when the piston has already started his descent.

Their answer was:

Your EE friend would be right if the capacitor were wired in series to the HV circuit but it is in parallel so the time it takes for the capacitor to charge is contemporaneous with the ionization period so timing and total spark event duration is unchanged.

Sound fair enough. When I decide to change the spark plugs on my car, I will let you know. Also if anyone has any real world experience with Enerpulse's plugs please email me and I'll post your results on this blog.

Thanks