Tips to Mechanically Improve Gas Mileage

Video Transcript

"You want to get the best possible fuel economy that you can from your vehicle, probably the first thing is check your tire inflation pressure, your wheel alignment and the next thing to do is you want to make sure that you, you know drive appropriately. Driving habits are very important. You want to make as few stops as possible. You want to, you know watch your traffic lights and make sure that you're going to roll through on the green so you adjust your speed to meet those requirements and that will again net higher fuel economy. Also speed is important too. You want to keep your speed below fifty five miles an hour, even when you travel on the interstate. Of course you're going to have people honking at you and wanting you to move over etcetera, but again if you want good fuel mileage which we call hyper miling, that would be some of the techniques that you would want to use. So that all counts. One of the other things that people always ask, should I turn my air conditioner off. Actually some recent tests show that yeah, you should use your air conditioner. Speeds above thirty five miles an hour on the car has less wind resistance than it would with the windows open at those speeds and will actually consume less fuel. Another myth that's out there, people with pick up trucks think they're going to get better mileage by lowering the tail gate. Actually it doesn't improve gas mileage at all, and it just helps to wear out the bed of the truck from the tail gate bouncing up and down. Of course if you really want to get good gas mileage you can drive something like that. And that vehicle without really trying will get anywhere from thirty two to forty five miles per gallon quite easily. If you want a hyper mile then you could actually get in excess of fifty. But you can improve gas mileage just by using some good sensible driving techniques. You want to accelerate like you have an egg under the gas pedal that you don't want to break or crush and accelerate smoothly, no jack rabbit starts, you don't want to break abruptly, you want to slow down smoothly and actually keep rolling and not actually stop and you'll be surprised how much your fuel mileage will increase."