Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Hypermiling: Informal player

So, a coworker gave me some numbers for a parallel experiment that he did (and is continuing). He drives a lot farther than me every day and has a smaller tank so he's on a faster pace than I am. The following are the results of his initial experiment (in his Kia Rio).

In one tank of gas with normal driving, he got 27.2 mpg. Then he checked the air pressure in his tires and found that three were at 35psi but one was at 22psi. The recommended pressure is 35psi and the maximum is 44psi. So, he filled them all up to 42psi and drove for another tank of gas.

Results: 32.3 mpg, an improvement of 5.1 mpg just by overinflating his tires (and fixing the one that was underinflated previously). That's pretty impressive, now I'm encouraged that I'll see some real results in my experiment.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You might want to be careful about the over infated tires. In the summertime, the high southern daytime heat combined with the normal heat from driving could result in blown tires (and possible accidents). For the same reason, you should never check tire pressure after driving for a while...the warm tires give a false high reading and if you reduce pressure to the manufacturers recommendation you'll end up with severly under infalted tires... just as dangerous.