Adventures in Hypermiling

By Nancy Trejos
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 15, 2008; F01

I hate driving. I hate it even more now that I can't afford it.

With gasoline topping $4 a gallon in many places, there's no shortage of advice from the financial experts: Try carpooling, biking or walking. Cut costs in other parts of your life. Eat out less and stop shopping. Carefully choose the brand and type of gasoline you use because some are more cost-efficient than others. Or just get rid of your car.

Then I heard about "hypermiling," which involves changing your driving behavior to coax better gas mileage out of your car. Hypermilers do such things as drive slowly, brake as little as possible and limit their use of the air conditioner to save fuel.

Not eager to stop going out to dinner with friends and unable to sell my car, I figured I would see what hypermiling was about. Perhaps whatever savings it might produce would be enough to cover the cost of fixing my broken passenger-side window, courtesy of a drunken reveler in Adams Morgan, where I live. (Did I mention how much I hate having a car in this city?)

I googled hypermiling and found no shortage of Web sites offering tips. There's Ecomodder.com, HyperMilingForum.com and CleanMPG.com, among others. I contacted them all in search of someone to teach me how to hypermile and ended up with an e-mail introduction to Kent Johnson, a consultant for an engineering company who lives in Carroll County, Md.

After a brief phone conversation in which he asked me the size of my engine -- Is that really something I should know off the top of my head? -- Johnson and I arranged to meet on Wednesday at a parking lot at the University of Maryland at College Park. He appeared in his red 2005 Chevy Aveo with his wife Mary, who sells Mary Kay cosmetics. He brought along tons of material he had found on the Internet about my silver 2001 Volkswagen Beetle, putting me to shame, as I didn't even know where my driver's manual was until I found it in a bookshelf in my apartment that morning .

"With an automatic, you should get 29 miles on the highway, 22 in the city and 25 combined," Johnson said. "So on average, you should be around 25 miles per gallon."

"Is that bad?" I asked. I have to admit, I didn't think about mileage when I bought my Beetle used a couple of years ago. All I thought about was how cute it would be to have a Bug. (A child of the 1980s, I played the "Punch Buggy" game with my friends, which involved punching each other when we came across a VW Beetle on the street. "Punch Buggy Yellow!" I would shout with glee.)

"I'm betting we can do 10 percent better," Johnson answered.

According to FuelEconomy.gov, he said, it costs me about $4.59 to drive 25 miles.

"Thanks, hon," he said to his wife of 29 years -- they had just celebrated their anniversary, they giddily told me -- as she ducked into their car and reappeared with a calculator.

"So every mile, you've got to chuck in 18 cents, if you wanted to think of it like that," he said.

"Do I have to?" I asked.

Johnson does, all the time. Fed up with high gasoline prices, he decided to become a hypermiler in September. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, he should be able to drive 30 miles per gallon in the city and highway combined in his Aveo. According to FuelEconomy.gov, it should cost him about $3.74 to drive 25 miles. With techniques he has learned on CleanMPG.com, he has routinely been able to eke out 10 more miles per gallon, a savings of about 4 cents a mile, by his calculations.

Johnson knows all this because he bought himself a contraption called a ScanGauge. It's an electronic box that plugs into a port connected to your car's computer and tells you how fast you're going, how many miles per gallon you're getting and much more. Johnson climbed into my car and plugged in the device somewhere underneath the steering wheel. Then he pulled it over to the passenger side as I settled into the driver's seat.

"We'll pull it over my way because we don't want you to see what you're doing," he said.

"Okay, that's fine. I usually don't know what I'm doing," I said.

Upon hearing this, Johnson turned around and asked his wife, sitting in my tiny back seat and munching on cereal bars, to buckle her seat belt.

Johnson planned a trip that would take us through the campus; east on Route 193; south on Route 1; back into the campus; around a rotary; through several stops, crosswalks and lights; across Route 193; then back into campus and into a student parking lot.

"How fast should I go?" I asked.

"How fast do you normally go?" he asked.

"I never really pay much attention," I said.

"You just drive your normal way," he said.

It turns out that my normal way is slow. I will admit it. I am not a good driver. And that makes me nervous, especially when I have other people in the car with me. When it comes to driving, and probably nothing else, I'm simply too scared to go fast.

And that makes me a good hypermiler. Hypermilers advocate going at or below the speed limit. Johnson and a few other hypermilers I talked to also avoid braking heavily and idling excessively. When they get into their cars, they put on their seat belts and adjust their mirrors before turning on the engine. If they know they're going to be at a red light for a long time, they turn off their engines. When they're going downhill, they put their cars in neutral or simply glide down.

Critics say some hypermilers take these practices to the extreme. They say that driving too slowly on, say, the Capital Beltway, is dangerous. Driving too slowly on a one-lane road, they say, is simply rude. There are other controversial hypermiling techniques, such as drafting, which involves closely following a tractor-trailer to reduce wind resistance.

"Many of the techniques that the hypermilers use can prove rather effective in cutting gas consumption, but you have to think about not only your safety but the safety of others first," said John Townsend, a spokesman for AAA Mid-Atlantic. "Some of the things they do can be rather dangerous."

When asked about such criticisms, Wayne Gerdes, the owner of CleanMPG.com, gets emotional. "I get e-mails, just hate mail, you wouldn't believe it," he said.

What's wrong with driving at the speed limit? he asked me.

Back in my Bug, I could see why Gerdes gets so worked up. As I drove 40 miles per hour, the speed limit, cars either honked or drove so closely behind me as to try to intimidate me out of the lane.

The car behind me finally drove around me and accelerated but did not make it past the red light. As I pulled up slowly to the light, I noticed he was one car ahead of me.

"Look how much farther ahead of me he is after he chased me down the road," I said.

"That's part of hypermiling: to understand that going slow is better than going fast," Johnson said. "Just be the smooth operator."

I was pretty smooth, Johnson said upon returning to the parking lot. "You already have a very nice, gentle technique," he said. That said, I kept modulating on the gas pedal, that is, applying pressure then easing up. I also spent too much time at stop signs and sometimes accelerated to a red light.

He showed me the readings on the ScanGauge. I had driven 6.9 miles at a rate that would get me 23.9 miles per gallon. The trip cost me 87 cents.

He looked at my tires. "When was the last time you checked your tire pressure?"

"Um . . . well . . . hmmm," I responded.

He knelt down and checked each of my tires. The front two were fine. The back two were not. This was important, he said, because the higher the pressure, the lower the rolling resistance and the better the fuel economy.

Johnson asked me to drive the route once more, this time applying some of his tips. During our first trip, as Johnson let me do my own thing so he could study my driving, I had spent more time asking the two about themselves -- they met on a blind date -- than about the driving.

This time, I was in deep concentration. When I got to the first stop sign, I did not linger too long. When I saw a red light, I took my foot off the gas pedal and let the car coast. Sometimes, I didn't even have to stop because the light turned green as I glided to it.

Then a biker appeared, seemingly out of nowhere.

"You saw that?" Johnson asked.

"Hardly," I said.

"We don't want to get too much into the mode of driving that we forget we're driving," he said. It was a line that would have made the AAA Mid-Atlantic guy proud.

Then we got to a stop light, and we knew from driving it the first time that it would be a long one.

"Now turn your engine off," Johnson said.

This made me nervous, but I complied. I turned it off and pulled the key out.

"No, keep the key in," he said.

When the light turned green, I wasn't ready for it. It took me too long to get the key back into the ignition and restart the car. The car behind me honked. I accelerated.

Despite my best efforts, I did a little bit worse the second time. Miles per gallon: 23.6.

Now it was Johnson's turn.

Before climbing into the driver's seat, he did something really bizarre. He took off his shoe. Mary giggled. I gave him a puzzled look. Driving in a sock allows him to better feel how much pressure he's applying to the accelerator, he explained.

We proceeded as the light turned yellow. "There's probably no way I can slow down long enough or far enough to make it through this light," he said.

We stopped. When the light turned green, he pulled away. Our miles per gallon dropped to 24. Then we went downhill. He took his foot off the gas pedal. Our miles per gallon went up to 75.

Next we got to the long light where I had fumbled as I tried to shut off the car. Johnson was eager to show me how it's done. But his cellphone rang. He had to answer it. As he talked, we sat there with the car idling. By the time he was done, the light was about to change. He lost his chance.

"Another reason for not talking on the phone when you're driving," he said. "Yeah, that probably cost me."

It did. We returned to the parking lot to read the ScanGauge. Mary handed him the calculator. "I did 4, almost 5 percent better," he said. "That's not the best."

Still, he proved that some of his techniques work. Do I plan to use everything he taught me? Probably not. I'm simply not comfortable with turning off my engine at a stop light. Am I going to stop using my air conditioner when it's hot out? No way. Townsend of AAA Mid-Atlantic gave what I think is good advice on hypermiling: "You need to study it. You need to school yourself. And you need to determine which tools work for you."