The basics on fuel economy for a small car, part I

Although electric vehicles are on the rise now, they still have some disadvantages over ICE vehicles, such as price, finding charging stations, range, in a city that may not be a real concern. But, electric vehicles do have some interesting points in their favor, and one of the biggest points is that electric motors are incredibly efficient, no internal combustion engine can compete in efficiency against electric motors.

But until I can afford an electric vehicle, what I can try is to make my car more energy-efficient, the first step is to gather data, so I recently bought a scanner tool for my car, I bought it mainly for detecting possible issues that may occur in my vehicle, however, I ended up using it for logging information while I’m driving, I got running the android version and started to log my speed, as well as plotting the velocity, instant fuel economy, among other data.

In the next table, you can see the engine specifications for my vehicle.

Is important to note that this approach for fuel economy may not work on other types of cars, this will depend on several aspects like: how big the car is, how heavy the vehicle is, the rolling resistance in the tires, the drag coefficient of the car, carburated vs FI, transmission type, etc.

Reduce Drag

Removing external carrying such as bike racks or roof storage. The vehicle has to work harder due to extra wind resistance, this can improve the fuel efficiency quite drastically but it can also be as simple as keeping the vehicle clean.

Don’t let the engine struggle at low rpm.

This is common knowledge for any manual transmission car, changing gears as soon as possible. Accelerate gently from stop and change to a higher gear even before you hear the engine struggle in the low gear.

Use the kinetic energy of the car.

Kinetic energy is the energy of an object in motion. When the vehicle accelerates it uses the potential chemical energy in the fuel and transforms it, into mechanical energy, this in turn moves the car. So keep the vehicle momentum by planning ahead in the road, use gravity to your advantage when going downhill, keep the engine in gear, and do not accelerate. This can save a lot of fuel, as is a lot more efficient to do this rather than to suddenly stop with the vehicle brakes.

Keep the vehicle speed steady.

Sudden spurts of acceleration can increase fuel consumption by up to 10-15% in my case. A simple option for cars is to use cruise control on the highway.

Reduce internal friction

This is one of the most important tips for fuel economy, and this is as simple as changing the oil in the car and using the recommended oil, however I found that certain oil additives can help a little with friction inside the car.

Monitoring in real time

The most important tip for high fuel economy, The device on the first picture is really good cause it let me see the real fuel economy improvement that I have, and adjust and change my driving if is wasting too much fuel. The next pictures are screenshots of my android device (I used a screen recorder and then took screenshots from there, do no use the phone while driving)

So for example on the next image, you can see that the vehicle speed is increasing but it also increased the fuel economy, that’s because I accelerated and then took my foot off the throttle. Keeping the car in gear while I glide downhill.

The next pictures are photos of my car mini screen where the fuel economy is displayed. This is the combined fuel economy, however I think these values are wrong by just a small percentage, perhaps 3-4% since all of my driving for this logging occurred in the city.

Note: Any hard acceleration or any bursts of speed will throw off these results, the techniques for hypermiling have to be consistent to maintain these numbers.

For the next post, I’ll try more techniques and changing parts to discover if these can save up more fuel.