I trust even with the slight drop of crude oil prices, we're all still in a dilemma of rising living costs, and forever tighter budgets. With the rise of interests from banks controlling loans, a drop in second hand car prices, and slow down of new car purchases and the 200-300% rise in raw material costs experienced in this 1 or 2 years, everyone will still be on the lookout stretching their limited cash reserves to extra lengths. Well there are also ways of stretching our every tank of petrol to go further. And it all comes down to our habits, and of course adding in some science in the process.1. Be light on the foot, depressing the gas pedal going faster would only render a smaller engine car drinking more fuel than a larger engine cruising along.
2. Switch off your air con when its really not needed, which would help around 10% on fuel efficiency alone. Of course if speeds catch up, opening a window would screw aerodynamics, adding drag to your car, causing an increase in fuel consumption.
3. Reducing the load in your car, fetching lesser unused items means a lighter car, and a lighter load requires less fuel to move it around.
4. Plan your routes, driving around, U-Turn, circling, all takes up unnecessary petrol.
5. Modern cars need not a few minutes of engine warming before you drive them around, start them, wait for the rpm to idle back to the normal rpm, and drive off.
6. Cut off your engine during waits, either outside of a friend's place, or when you're refilling at a station.
7. Going to the extreme, for extremists, sporting a downhill slope would meant cutting off the engine and rolling down hills, or tailgating a car on the highway (not recommended) would result in lesser wind resistance, helping with your car's aerodynamics and saving petrol.
8. If your car do have a rather large gas tank, consider only pumping petrol at night and only pump in half a tank. As 50 liters of petrol would weigh around 30kg, of which is a weight penalty pointless to lug around, (And M3 buyers claim their carbon fiber roof saves 5kg...) and petrol was calculated by volume and not weight, hence temperatures do affect their expansion.
9. Take away those stupid ricer wings and spoilers. Drive along at 80km and put your palms out of your window, feel how much air was pushed against your palm and you can imagine how much air your stupid spoilers are slowing your car down, increasing fuel consumption
10. Roll to a halt rather than accelerating to the lights and then slow down by hard braking. Since you need to stop anyway, why waste petrol and your brake pads?
11. Say no to colleagues asking for free rides. (Not recommended to be used on superiors or Bosses)
12. Check your tyre pressures, a loss of 2 psi per tyre would result in 1% of higher fuel consumption. Don't believe? Try rolling an inflatable life buoy which is fully inflated vs one that's partially deflated.
13. Switch from high displacement engines to small displacement engine + turbo chargers. Contrary to popular believes that a turbo charged engine takes in more petrol, they actually provide extra performance with the same amount of fuel needed.
