Hypermilling – Saving Fuel

Cruise control can be really useful in reducing your fuel usage. It probably one of the easiest, yet most effective, hypermilling techniques avaiable to the average driver.

The aim is simple – decide on a decent, efficient, safe speed for a particular portion of a journey. Set your cruise control at that speed and off your tootle. used in this way cruise control can avoid some of the normal driving habits that are in contradiction to good hypermilling techniques.

Speed creep – many drivers speed tends to creep up over a journey.

Speed decay – just as many drivers tend to slow down over a journey.

Using your cruise control also helps you reproduce and tweak your driving – try a journey at a set speed then try the journey the next day at 5mph less, does it make a difference? Common opinion suggests slower is better – that’s simply wrong, you will soon find that your particular car (size, weight, shape, power gearing etc) on its particular journey has an optimal speed.

Cruise control is also great at avoiding the perfectly normal inability of most drivers to keep their right foot steady – once you have set the required speed the cruise control will maintain that speed for you without you having to constantly trim your speed using the rather blunt istrument at the end of your leg.

Using the cruise control on the motorway also forces you to adopt good practise – to stay in cruise you will have to look further ahead to avoid other vehicles and to plan overtaking.

If you are facing hilly conditions then you must override the cruise control to stay within good hypermilling techniques. Remember that you should speed up when going downhill to take you up the next incline.

Also do not use cruise control if you are not 100% confident with it – it is your responsibility to control the car at all times and you must never let the car drive you. Ofter hypermilling sites advocate using cruise control in urban environments at the lowest speeds the device will activate. This is idiotic, would you want a hypermilling lunatic driving past your childrens school at kicking out time on cruise control?

Adaptive cruise control (ACC) is becoming more common – the car then accepts a target desired speed and tries to keep to that but will monitor the traffic, road conditions and car attitude in order to vary that speed if required. As well as being more efficient this technology can also help reduce traffic jams – reduing fuel consuption and wasted hours for everyone – research here shows that when buying a new car ACC should be on your wish list.