8 weeks of clean living

I’m about to go on a fairly long road trip (around 450 miles each way), and I’m curious about how to maximize the efficiency of my trip. Obviously I could try something novel, like taking a train, but I’m swapping cars at the destination, so this one I have to drive. The most substantial change I’m going to make on this trip is to attempt to actually drive the speed limit. I’m going to be traveling several hundred miles on Interstate 5 in California, and traditionally I drive somewhere between 80 and 90 MPH. According to fueleconomy.gov, every 5 MPH one drives over 60 MPH is equivalent to paying $.20 extra per gallon of gas (and therefore using that much additional gas). So this time around I will try to maintain a steady 70 MPH during the trip. Incidentally, the ideal speed (in terms of energy use) is different from car to car and depends on several factors. There are tons of other ways to make driving more efficient, and I’m planning on making them the subject of an upcoming opinion piece (where I rant about the people who zoom out from behind me only to slam on their brakes at the stoplight 100 ft ahead).

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 5:40 pm and is filed under Transportation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.