Zen
and the Art of Hypermiling
Monday, July 14, 2008
Hypermiling
isn't for wimps
I don't drive much thanks to the Goldline and the rest of
LA's light rail and subway system. When I do drive it's
mostly through dense urban traffic, so hypermiling is an
art I find little time to practice and experiment.
OK, that's not totally true since I've been hypermiling
through LA traffic long before hybrid
cars first hit the road. In my old manual Nissan
Sentra from my old Pasadena neighborhood, I would try to
coast through Arroyo Parkway traffic touching the breaks
as little as possible.
Thus, when I became a hybrid driver, my city driving
changed little. In fact, either in a Toyota
Prius or a Camry
hybrid, I can coast in EV mode through much of LA's
commuting congestion achieving unbelievable - at least to
non-hybrid drivers - fuel economy.
Highway hypermiling, however, is a whole different story.
Open highway driving is just something I seldom do, and
when I do drive on the open road, I've found a total focus
on hypermiling to be a difficult experience. Nonetheless,
as I needed to cover a couple thousand miles this weekend,
I thought I'd give it a try.
And what I learned was a zen-like lesson in patience, but
back to the art of hypermiling.
I experimented with various speeds on flat land, on hills.
I tested multiple ways of pulse-driving, with
semi-drafting and much, much more. If I learned one thing,
night time is the best for serious long-distance
hypermiling. The night brings cool temperatures - no need
for AC - and, most important, little traffic. Thus, when
you coast down a long hill for example and coast into your
cruise-controlled standard speed, you can experiment with
multiple speeds. At night, therefore, even when the speed
limit was 80, I might coast to 55 mph and then stay at
that speed for several miles, eventually, slowly pulsating
my speed back up to 80.
During the day, experimenting with such techniques is not
often possible and sometimes dangerous, so the night is
perfect.
Still, the most interesting revelation that I had
regarding my hypermiling experiments was the incredible
amount of cognitive endurance required to achieve optimal
performance. While some will surely mock this revelation,
rather than finding this mental requirement to be
stressful, I found it to be more like some form of zen,
and a very addictive form.
And, even when the Interstates were too full of traffic to
optimize my hypermiling, sitting in cruise-control at, or
even a little below the speed limit, is so much less
stressful than trying to go 10 miles over the speed limit.
Instead of getting angry at the drivers that refuse to
yield the left lane to faster drivers, or the semi's that
cut you off at the last minute, I marveled at how simple
and stress-free driving becomes when you remove yourself
from the rat race mentality that big city living often
breeds, especially on the open roads of the US interstate
system.
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