Fuel Economy: Good to the Last Drop

out there. I think about what makes a car economic as far as fuel consumption goes, and and the behaviors that that tie into fuel economy. Right, well, it seems easy. It seems like you know, you've got this this miles per gallon thing on a little sticker on your car when you buy it, and and better miles per gallon is better, right, higher miles per gallon equals Yes. Yeah, I think, um, everybody's heard these words, but there's some of these words that I don't know why certain terms

end up this way. But you know this concept of semantic satiation where you hear a phrase so many times that it stops having meanings. It becomes sort of a cone. You're just you're just you hear it, and it just like, oh yeah, those are words that I've heard in that order before, but it doesn't actually have any applications. It just sounds, you know, that's pretty much everything. My wife, it's kind of like that. It's a joke. I know, I know, you're a sweet man. Okay, So let's make

miles per gallon reel again. Well, first of all, let's apologize to anyone who's not in the United States who yeah, because this this is going to be a very US centric kind of of topic, mostly because when we're talking about miles prig gallen, we're talking about a government agency in the United States that actually tests this stuff, Environmental

Protection Agency. Yes, the e p a UH in the US tests vehicles and then gives the miles pregallon rating for both city miles and highway miles for every vehicle sold in the United States. Well, and it's it's not that foreign countries don't have some kind of Some countries that are not the US rather have you know, don't have never heard of this kind of thing. You know,

there's there's either leaders per kilometer or um. I think that the designation in many metric using countries, these days is leaders per hundred kilometers actually, but I'll get into that in a moment. Right, A hundred that actually seems maybe more useful because it's more averaged out, it's more averaged out, and it gives you a more manageable number to think about. Well, yeah, I guess miles per gallon though, I guess that's comes from some kind of averaging process.

But then, but then, you know, it's not that every vehicle has the same amount of storage space like tank space, right, So miles per gallon is really only useful if you're actually doing the math in your head of well, my my tank can hold twelve point five gallons and it gets forty miles to the gallon, which means that a full tank of gas, I've got to contact my child

who's in school and can still do math. Um. Yeah, I mean that's but if you're talking about miles to the hundred, you know, how many leaders for a hundred kilometers, then that gives you a better idea of how far you can go based upon a certain amount of fuel. And it's also when you're comparing vehicles that makes it pretty easy. But what does the e p A do well Technically, it does one of two things. Either will test a vehicle at its National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions

Laboratory in vf e L, which is an an arbor Michigan. UH. It will either put a vehicle through tests there, or they will also accept vehicle manufacturers data on the subject. So if the manufacturer has done its own tests and the data, they can send the data into the e p A, and the e p A will use that and its rating. What happens if they're not entirely truthful. That's a good question, and I don't have the answer

to it. I would I would suspend. I'm hoping that they that they only accept data of a certain scientific rigor. I would imagine, so, although I cannot that, I am fairly certain. And that's well at any rate in the United States anyway, particularly in well not everywhere, but many places the United States, you have to do what are called emissions testing, where you are making sure that your

vehicle emissions are within certain parameters. And UH, I would suspect that if a lot of vehicles were testing outside of it of a particular make and models. But anyway, that's that's related to malls pre Gallant. It's not analogous

to it. It's not exactly the same thing, but any anyway, So the e p a UH uses this information not only to put on the stickers of cars, and by the way, those stickers have changed over the last couple of years, they've been updated, and I'll talk about that in a second, But they also provide this information about the fuel economy to various other departments within the United States government. Some of them would be pretty easy for

you to guess, like the Department of Energy. The Department of Energy uses those to create its annual Fuel Economy Guide. They also send this information to the Department of Transportation, which uses this information to create its Corporate Average Fuel Economy program I'll soon as Cafe CF and it doesn't have a little accent over it, so who knows. And then of course they send it off to everyone's favorite

governmental agency in the entire world, Internal Revenue RS. That's for their gas guzzler taxes programs where they get taxed more if you're having a vehicle that is not very efficient. Yeah, so there are a lot of different incentives to getting a fuel efficient car, one of which is just that you don't want to spend so much money whenever you have to go to the to the gas station, right,

you don't want to have to go frequently. Even if you hate the planet Earth, You've actually got a totally good, selfish reason to want to get really good fuel economy. Yeah, you don't want to have to refuel all the time. You don't have to be some kind of environmentalists to

to really want to maximize milesburg Allen. Sure. Yeah, you you want to be able to to stretch your dollar as far as it will go, right in the United States, But assuming you don't hate the Earth, well, assuming you don't hate the Earth, you'll also want to be very economic with your fuel consumption to produce fewer greenhouse gases, to also create less demand in general for fuel, because that causes you know that that's there's a lot of

energy that's just put into getting fuel, refining fuel, getting it to the place where it needs to be. There's also from a national perspective, there is a a an incentive to reduce our dependence upon foreign oil politically. Politically, yes, because there are a lot of purposes reasons there, and you know, granted that's been changing a lot recently anyway, with different techniques for getting oil out of the ground.

But all of these factor into reasons why fuel economy is a big deal, from the very personal to the global scale. So the way they do this is they test out these vehicles in this facility and they try two different general styles of driving, which have undergone some tweaking over the years as Bull's driving habits in general have changed. Keep in mind, all of this is very very generalized. The individual driving style is going to determine a lot about the fuel economy of a specific vehicle

more than just these tests. So Lauren could be driving, uh, the exact same type of car that Joe drives, but both of your driving styles may be very different, so your actual experience of how frequently you need to refuel could also be different. It also depends, I mean, because because I think, Jonathan, that you're about to talk about highway versus city driving, and and that also depends highly

on um. I mean, you know, what you would consider a highway here in Atlanta, you perhaps would not reach the speeds that sometimes of day that you would reach on a highway in any other place on the planet besides Los Angeles. Well, Los Angeles and Atlanta have a lot in common as far as the driving habits are concerned. Uh yeah, I mean it's in general. The way they

define this, it's it's called city versus highway. But really what they mean is with highway driving, it's you're the idea that you're traveling at what the speed limit would be on your typical highway, at cruising speed without a lot of acceleration or deceleration or breaking. So, in other words, your engine would be operating at a consistent level for a prolonged period of time. How many miles pre gallon

would you get in that set of circumstances. That's so that's highway miles, and those, of course tend to be greater. I mean they are. They are greater than city miles, because what city miles are. That's the idea of if you're driving around in an area where you do have to decelerate or accelerate depending upon you know, traffic lights, traffic itself, stop signs, that kind of thing. Um, whether you're going to be using the brakes a lot, whether

you're gonna have a lot of idle time. So let's say that you come up to a stop stop light where you're gonna be sitting there for about thirty seconds just running your engine with your brakes to press down. Yeah exactly. That ends up consuming fuel. So your city miles are always fewer than your highway miles. But they test this in laboratory additions. So first of all, it's not directly analogous to what you are going to experience

on a day to day basis driving your vehicle. Right, So, if you're driving your vehicle, whether it's in Atlanta, which can be a traffic nightmare for anyone who has traveled through our beautiful city, or someplace where the traffic is considered to be pretty light and well managed, it's still going to be different than what you see on that sticker.

You might have a little sticker shock when you start actually figuring out how many miles prell in your car quote unquote really gets compared to what it says on the sticker. But that depends both on the real world situation you're in and you're driving habits. Now, back in two thousand and eleven, the e p A and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration redesigned the miles per gallon stickers on cars. So if you haven't bought a car

recently or haven't been shopping for a car recently. The stickers will look a little different to you now, depending upon if they've rolled them out yet or not. They were. I think they began in all model year cars. Yeah, um, but but I think that was a It wasn't. I'm not sure if it was mandatory. It was not mandatory. It was one of those things that people that manufacturers and dealerships could opt into doing, and more and more are doing that because it tends to reflect well in sales.

But generally the stickers now have lots of stuff on there besides just these two numbers. So originally you would see, you know, the highway highway miles per gallon and the city miles per gallon. Now it goes into things like a comparison of the energy use and cost between uh that particular vehicle and a typical gasoline powered vehicle the average. So take all the vehicles across the entire line average that out, that would compare your vehicle, the vehicle you're

looking at, versus that that hypothetical average vehicle. So and the amount of of savings specifically in fuel that you would assuming that you would get that because you could have you could have a you could be looking at a vehicle that falls below this average, in which case you would see that there's a deficit there um. But it would give you the idea of UH, how it

matches up against this sort of hypothetical average vehicle. It would also give you estimates on how much you'll save UH per year on fuel costs compared to this average vehicle. So it might say, you know, if you were to buy this, you would save two thousand dollars per year on fuel costs or eight thousand dollars per year. It all depends on what kind of vehicle you're looking at.

It also gives ratings on how your vehicle compares to others when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, which again, if you're environmentally conscious, that could be a very important component to buying a car. There also will give an estimate of how much fuel or electricity it requires to drive one miles, So this is more similar to the approach you were talking about about the leaders to a

hundred kilometers. This would give you an idea of how how many how much gas do you need to go one hundred miles or how much of a charge does it take to go a hundred miles? So you can kind of make that determination of is this vehicle efficient for the way I use vehicles. If I go on a lot of cross country trips, Uh, an electric vehicle may not be very Uh, it might not be a good decision for me, just because the way that I

would need to recharge it. I don't know that I would be able to hit enough recharging stations, and the recharging time it takes to get back to a full charge might mean that a different kind of vehicle would be better for me. But if I do a lot of short trips in a city, an electric vehicle may make perfect sense. So these are the sort of things that allow you to make those kind of decisions with

as much information as possible. It also gives you the idea of the driving range information for electric vehicles, plus the actual amount of time it takes to charge one to full charge from empty. And uh, like you said, Lauren, the labels began to roll out late into It's still being adopted in some places and some places it may not have been adopted yet. But if you see one

of these, that's what you know. That's what this is all about is to give the consumer more information when it comes to few economy, and of course things have made that more complicated. Everything from hybrid cars and electric vehicles have made this a very difficult conversation to have in some ways because we don't all we're not all using the same power source, right, We're not all using the same sort of fuel, So that makes it a

little tricky when you're starting to try and make comparisons. Right, what is a gallon of gas compared to the output of electricity from a nuclear power plant? For this is a coal power plant. Are you are you charging your car at peak our journey? Yeah? Sure, yeah. There are a lot of different factors. It makes it pretty complex, so I can understand why this is a confusing subject. But even if you're just looking at miles per gallon,

that alone gets pretty confusing. That also ties into a tool I wanted to mention, the instant miles per gallon readout, which is also known as an instant fuel consumption display or instant fuel economy gauge. Now, if you've ever driven a hybrid vehicle, you've seen one of these, because they're standard and just about re hybrid vehicle. I've ever seen. This is. This is what tells you how much gas you are consuming at the current moment, at that precise moment.

I've seen even non hybrid vehicles. Sure, there are non hybrid vehicles that have it's just that you find them in all hybrid vehicles at this point as far as I know. But yeah, this is starting to become something that you'll see in other vehicles as well. Uh. In fact that I've driven, well, I've written in a couple of vehicles. At least I don't drive, so I am the wrong person to talk about the personal experience. But

how these work. They actually have lots of different sensors, and the sensors are all collecting data on various things that are going on inside your car. For example, the how hard your engine is working. Their sensors that measure that and factor that. There are sensors that measure the fuel flow rate through the fuel lines of your vehicle.

There are manifold pressure uh sensors. Now, your manifold, in case you don't know, the intake manifold is a series of tubes that distributes air into your engine so that it can mix with the fuel so that it will combust. How are you laughing at joke? A series of tubes. It's not the Internet. It's not the Internet. It's a totally different series of tubes. Um, But no, it is.

It is a series of tubes. It's you know, these tubes open or clothes, depending upon the cycle that your engine is in, because in some cycles it needs to take an air and the rest of them you do not want those to be open. But it will measure the manifold pressure. There are other sensors that will measure

the throttle position of the vehicle. And there is a central computer that takes in all this information that's been gathered up by the sensors and then calculates how much fuel is being consumed at that exact moment, sending that information to some sort of display that is easily readable uh for the driver. Uh. And this will give you an instant look at what what your your car is

doing at that time. And in fact, if you have a vehicle in the United States anyway, if you have a vehicle that was manufactured after but does not have one of these, it's very easy to get one installed. Because any vehicle manufactured after that year sold in the US had to have as part of it an onboard diagnostic system or the O b D two. Uh. This is essentially a computer on your in your car that it's monitoring everything that's going on in your engine and

et cetera. Exactly. Yeah, So if your engine check engine light comes on, that's because something has been detected by this on board system and it tells the light to come on, which of course tells you to put a piece of tape over that light. Uh. The but no, you can have you can have one of these gauges connected to that system. I would not do this myself because I am not a car guy. I would actually

have someone else do it for me. But I have been told that it's one of those relatively easy things to do for yourself if you're if you're the handy type, I am not, so I would. I would leave that to someone who is much more confident in their abilities to work with the car without ruining it at any rate.

So you can get these that are standard with your vehicle, some of them are optional with vehicles, and of course there are aftermarket solutions like I just said, and this will give you that instant look at what your car is doing. So if you think of the e p A numbers as kind of like climate and the instant gauge as being weather. That's kind of the idea here, Like the climate is sort of the long term, that's what you can expect as sort of the average under

average conditions. The instant gauge gives you exactly what's happening at that moment and can even tell you what which of your behaviors as a driver are contributing to fuel consumption. Right, I'm you know. Part of it is just that it's making you more self aware of what you're doing, the same way that that wearing a fitness tracker, it's going

to make you more self aware of your movement. And um, that's that's that's part of what that entire switch from miles per gallon to gallons per mile thought is about researchers at Duke who had had an argument while car pooling in a hybrid car put together a study true backed they did, um, put put together a study and found that when you express things as gallons per one miles, people are able to make a better judgment call about what car of of two, or or what kind of

upgrade is going to be more I love that the reason that study was done is because some scientists had an argument in the car pool lane. That to me, like, that's how science has done. People. You get a bunch of scientists together, maybe get a drink until not if they're going to behind the wheel obviously, but you know, then they start getting in an argument. Next thing, you know, science happens. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's how quantum mechanics came about. Turn off the A C. Let him get

a little cranky. Turning off the A C is one of the ways that you can save fuel. Did you look into So what are some ways that the average person can get better miles per gallon or gallons per mile or uh fuel ecout leaders per hundred kilometers. Let's just say fuel economy out of their standard car. For

my sanity, let's say feel coconomy. Okay, well, you know, like like I said, air conditioning, and there is a little bit of buzz about you know, if if you're cruising around town and you have your windows rolled down and you accidentally form rhyme schemes while you're just talking in conversation, Um, that's not a necessary part of the equation. What would the drag from the open windows create uh

more taxing energy than the A C unit. Right, So if you have the windows rolled up a C blasting, or you had the A C off but the windows rolled down and the drag affecting the car, is one

more inefficient than the other. Basically, if you're if you're rolling around town, if you're if you're not getting up to highway speeds of say over fifty miles an hour, then go ahead roll your windows down and suffer, you know, enjoy the terrific air if you like to roll your windows down and have the A C blasting at fifty because then your villain and captain planets. That's fair, that's fair. He sludge, what were their names? He has had some

words with me in the past. I'm forgetting entirely right now, Joe. Um. But if you're if you're idling for more than a minute, turning off your engine, it seems like it would be a drastic thing. But if you know that a stoplight, for example, is going to take more than more than a minute, and and that's that's getting a little bit into um. Something called a hyper miling, which I believe

Joe is going to talk about in a seconds. That's also something that's going into the design of vehicles, and we can probably expect to see that rolled out over the next few years. A lot of more hybrid vehicles do this all the time, but a lot of other standard gasoline powered vehicles are starting to get into this start stop or idle stop mode where if the car detects that it's an idol, it'll end up shutting off

the engine. When you depress the accelerator, it will cause the engine to come back on, and that way it will cut down on fuel consumption automatically. So right now you've got people who are doing this manually unless they happen to have one of the vehicles that like a hybrid that does this already. Uh. But soon it's not even going to be a manual thing. It's just gonna be built into various vehicles, right um uh. Furthermore, don't

speed um cars. Cars gain efficiency up to about fifty five miles per hour, about eighty eight kilometers per hour, and after that they lose fuel efficiency. Um. It can be you know, for for another ten miles per hour, what's that kilometers per hour, you can lose like efficiency. According to the Department of energy. You Also, if you were to go fifty five miles per hour on an

Atlanta highway, you would probably be run off the road. Well, you know, like obviously this is a thing that that you know, don't don't disobey traffic laws and don't get yourself killed in order to save fuel. That would that would not kind of defeats the purpose. No other basic stuff coasting too stops rather than accelerating into a red light and then breaking. Really sharply, I can't believe everybody does this. I ride with people who there's a red

light up ahead and they're still pressing the gas. What's going on? It makes me very nervous or um or I don't say anything because I've been yelled at too many times. Or consider idling forward when you pull out rather than peeling out. Um quick acceleration is always going

to be your your biggest gas guzzler. Remove excess baggage from your car if you've got, uh, you know, removing the kind of rule of thumb is that removing a hundred pounds or about forty of weight from your car will give it a boost of one in fuel economy. So yeah, so don't just leave stuff laying around in your car if it doesn't need to be there right right got Um, Changing your air filter will not help uh, contrary to popular belief, unless your cars from before nine Um.

But a tune up can improve mileage by about four percent and keep your keep Keeping your oil fresh and clean um and and of the right grade for your car can give you another efficient and a lot of the things we're talking about here will also help cut down on general maintenance fees as well if you're keeping your car in good condition. While you will have to endure regular costs to keep your car in good working order.

Like you know, if you if you add those together, that's still less than what you have to do if you have to fix something, if something catastrophic happens. Right. That's also the case in terms of keeping your tires at the correct pressure. If you keep them at whatever the correct pressure is for your car, you can you

can prevent like three fuel efficiency loss from drag. I. Of course, if you overinflate them, um, you can either pop them and cause a terrible accident or um it will make breaking harder and therefore um it will cancel it any benefit you might have had. Yeah, So so really, obviously, taking care of your car is one of the big things, and just trying to avoid being overly aggressive when you're

driving is another. But there's some people who have really taken these techniques and extend them out to what one might say is a crazy level, right, Joe, Yeah, So these people are called hyper milers. They are people who want to get hyper miles, just ridiculous amounts of miles per gallon, totally unreasonable expectations for fuel economy and above and beyond what the e p A says. Right, A lot of what they do is based on the kind of stuff Lauren just said, which is totally reasonable. Uh So,

a lot of it's about optimizing your car. You want to remove all unnecessary way. You want to keep the oil change, You want to keep the tire pressure optimal and especially balanced so it's not more on one side than the other. Um and to just slow down, right, I mean, like she was saying, if every few miles per hour you go beyond fifty five or so, you're losing an incredible amount of efficiency. Um. So, stuff like

that is reasonable. Other stuff not so much. Now I'm going to explain a few things here and do not take this as a queue to go try them. These are not personal recommendations. We have we have moved out of the recommendations part of the episode. Yeah. Much of this is frankly not safe. Um, and some of which isn't exactly dangerous, could be majorly annoying to other people on the road. Uh. Yeah. So one of the things that these guys talk about is uh coasting, and so

coasting makes sense in one way. If you see up ahead there's a red light or something like that, you don't want to continue applying gas. You want to slow down and just coast. Another way of coasting, though, ties in with the thing they want to do, which is avoiding idling. So what you'll hear from a lot of these hyper miler hobbyists is that they will turn the gas off when they are going down here. Turn the gas off, turn the engine off. Do not do this, Okay.

The police say that this is illegal in some places, and where it's not illegal, it's dangerous either way. Uh, you should not be trying to do this. But they'll find every chance they can, essentially to turn the engine off because when a car is in neutral usually it's idling, which means it's using gas and you're getting zero miles burgallon, and they don't like that. So if you're stuck at a train, or if you're say, going through a drive through. Now,

typically hyper milers seem to hate drive throughs. You don't want to go through them. But if you do have to go through a drive through, what they're saying is turn your engine off while you're sitting at the drive through and just wait for the person ahead of you to go all the way through, and then you go after them, which is I'm sure makes you extremely popular with the people behind you. Um. There is another idea,

which is um ridge riding. I'm not sure where this fits into the safety picture, but the idea goes like this. So every day on a standard road there might you know, there are thousands of cars that go by, and eventually they cause an erosion or deterioration in the parts of the lane where the tires usually fall. So it's kind of wearing away a little spot and it's creating depressions there.

And so the idea of ridge riding is to ride in such a way that your tires do not you fall in the ruts made by most other cars and I think the idea is that if the road is at all wet, you'll avoid the friction created by puddles there, And if the road is not wet, you'll just generally cut down on the surface contact between your tire and the road. Your your car is a little offset from where the average car has traveled down that road. Yeah. I don't know what the experts say about the safety

of this. It sort of sounds weird to me because it sounds like they're saying you want to ride like off kilter of the lane. Yeah. I guess it would depend upon the width of the lane. If the lane is is particularly you know, there's some anyone who's had the pleasure of driving through Atlanta knows that lane with this kind of a variable. Yeah. It's it's sort of

different things to different people, you know. Um, but Yeah, there's some parts of Atlanta where you'll be in a lane and you're thinking this this this lane is like a car and a half wide, And there are other ones where you're thinking, I hope no one's coming the other way, because even though this is technically a two lane road, there's no space. Yeah. So I don't know for a fact that that one is a safety hazard, but I wouldn't recommend it, right, I would say hold

off and and let's wait till the facts are in. Yeah. Uh. One that is absolutely not a good idea is known as drafting. Um. This is where say you're on the freeway and traffic is moving at seventy miles an hour and you want keep up with traffic and go quickly. Well, why don't you just get over right behind a big tractor trailer and and ride right up on his backside,

Because then that cuts down on the air resistance. The tractor trailers doing all the work for you creates a slip stream, so it's sort of creating a cone of air resistance that goes around the truck, and you're not hitting it, so you're going just as fast, but with much less friction from the atmosphere. MythBusters actually did a segment on this where they tested it out to see if I think they said it works. They showed at

least in their tests. Keep in mind that it's a MythBusters test, and I love the MythBusters, But you know, it's one of those things that gives you an implication. You can't really think of it as necessarily scientifically rigorous, but there their experiments that they did were seemed to show that, yes, it was working. The only thing is that it is really dangerous things that if if someone in front of you breaks between between human human lapse time of of seeing and reacting and reacting, um is

at least a second. Yeah, you become you become semi pete. Right, you're well, you're you're putting yourself in danger, You're putting other cars on the road in danger. It's just it's a really horrible idea. Don't do this, Yeah, good, good, good rule of them is is to have two seconds between you and whatever is in front of you on the highway. Yeah. I usually go with uh, I usually

hear three. But it's the same sort of idea, the idea that you you look at something that the vehicle I have you has passed and start counting and if you got to if you didn't even get to two, you are a little too close. You need to back off. Um. Okay, So some other things that are definitely not as dangerous as that, but uh, but maybe really annoying and obsessive

involved the meticulous planning of routes. UM. So you learn exactly like, this route is ideal for the This is going to end up costing me the least amount of fuel, even if it's It might be a slightly longer route, but because there are fewer stops, that might mean that you get better fuel EFFICI Right, So if you if you go to like Google Maps or something and you ask them for directions, they're typically going to just give you the shortest route to get there, right, But that

isn't always the most fuel efficient route because if you're if you have the choice of driving a longer route with no other traffic on the road versus a shorter route with a lot of red lights in traffic, the longer route is in many cases going to be more You're gonna use less gas doing it because you're gonna spend less time idling. You're gonna spend less time changing speeds. That's a big thing. You want to avoid changing speed.

Keep your engine at a nice consistent level and it doesn't have to do a lot of work as it's shifting up or down. Right. Um, Hills can be a big thing to uh, ideally you'd want to just drive while ideally I guess you'd want to drive downhill all the way, but which you can do if you live in certain parts of San Francisco. The trouble is stopping. Um so a flat road is better than going over

a bunch of hills. And then also there are even more they're they're crazier things that people really do consider, like cross winds and headwinds. Now, let me ask you something about this, Joe, because I mean, I have heard about hyper miling before this. Our our colleague Josh Clark wrote an article for How Stuff Works about how hyper miling works. He even and he chucked an episode of stuff you should know about it. Uh so, but I really didn't know much about it before I had heard

them talk about it. To your knowledge, do you know if most people who are hyper milers are is that something they do consistently, Like this is something they do, This is a lifestyle choice for them that they do to in order to really conserve on fuel or is this one of those things that's more like I wonder how little fuel it will take me if I do all this stuff to do it like almost like bragging rights. Oh yeah, yeah, Well, I obviously I'm not deeply embedded

in the hyper miler community. But I've done a little reading online and from what I see, I don't think it's like people who are really interested in, say the environment or saving money all the time. I think it's more often a hobbyist kind of thing, you know, like like like min maxing your character in a role playing game. Me think Stephen King's short story about finding the shortest shortcut between two points. It's a really good it's it's a really good short story anyway. Um, But you just

think about all the things they go through. Um, I mean, I I do think getting really good fuel efficiency is a cool thing to do if you show how to do it, and paying attention can make a big difference. But when you think about all the things they do, in some cases it's it's such minutia, you know, just these tiny little things this that you're adding up. You kind of have to think it has to be sort of an intentional in most cases at least an intentional

lifestyle choice that that's sort of like a hobby. I mean, you think about like just the planning that goes into choosing a parking space. If you're a hyper miler, right, say you want to go park at some department store, Well, you don't actually want to park close to the door, because the time you spend looking for a parking space is going to be uh, fuel wasted while you're idling or waiting for somebody to back out, or trying to

get around where people are walking. Instead, what you probably want to do is like find the closest possible parking space to the entrance of the parking lot that faces outwards, so that you don't have to back out of the space when you're leaving. It makes me think like if you were to call up someone who was really serious into this and say, hey, I was thinking about catching a movie, you'd get an answer like, cool, I've run the numbers. Uh. January seven, at one m p m.

Is when we'll go. All the traffic lights they're gonna align. I don't know what's going to be playing, but that's why when we're gonna go. Yeah. And then from a from a money perspective, at a certain point, it sounds like your time could be better used in collecting aluminum cans. It comes down to that idea of of the people who will go to incredible lengths to get out of doing something and they end up expending way more energy and getting out of doing it than they would have

been just done it. Yeah. Yeah, like mega couponors or something like that. So I don't know. I think maybe there are some people who do this out of you know, something about about pollution or saving money. But but I think in many cases it's just like a it's a cool thing to figure out. Yeah, like I was able to go fifty nine miles on a single gallon of gas, that kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, and you know not to Obviously, fuel economy is something that we are

actually concerned about. It's just one of those things where there's there's always extremes, right, uh. Interesting, I mean, just remember all the stuff we engine that's reasonable and safe by all means. Do it. Sure, it's gonna help. It's gonna save you money, it's gonna save fuel, it's gonna help save just yeah, just don't turn your engine off

while you're driving, and don't tailgate or tractor trailer. Right Wait until those those uh at least the start stop thing becomes a standard part of most vehicles, because then you don't have to worry about handling all that manually. It'll be done for you. Um. So I was gonna talk a little bit about some of the the stuff that goes into engineering better fuel economy, especially moving forward.

Part of that is just coming up with new materials to build cars out of stuff that's more lightweight, because clearly the heavier vehicle is, the more work the engine has to do to move it, and therefore the more fuel it needs to consume in order to generate the power necessary to move that vehicle. So if you're able to make lighter vehicles, it takes less fuel to move them.

Not not tough to figure out. The government. The United States government has put fuel economy standards at fifty four and a half off miles per gallon by which is pretty that's a pretty big jump from where we are right now. A lot of this is gonna be you know, will be helped by things like hybrid vehicles electric vehicles. Obviously, you know, you're talking about totally different set of standards there, but hybrid vehicles UH end up consuming far less fuel than,

uh than a traditional gasoline only powered vehicle. UH. There's also the talk about using smaller turbocharged engines with a lot of electric accessories to take the load off of needing to burn more fuel, the idle stop features. We have already mentioned, lots of developments in transmissions, going to multi speed or continuously variable transmissions so that the engine has uh to make fewer big steps whenever you are

putting increased or decreased demand upon the engine. So instead of it shifting, you know, instead of having five speeds, maybe it has a hundred speeds. It's just that they're all so so narrow that the engine doesn't have to do a lot of to switch from one to the next. And then there's also the looking at some other future fuel potential. There's still this idea that may come about and may become a real viable thing of fuel cell vehicles.

Right now, fuel cell vehicles are there, are there are some. There are quite a few depending upon certain industries, but very few for consumer uh uses because we don't have a hydrogen fuel infrastructure out there, so it's really hard to refuel. You know, fuel cell ends up combining hydrogen and oxygen. Well, there are multiple different types of fuel cells, but the kind we usually talk about with cars uses

hydrogen and oxygen. There's an electrochemical reaction where you harness the electricity given off and then your output is electricity, heat, and water. So that's what you generate. Uh. You know, you don't have to worry about generating other greenhouse gases besides water. Vapor which is a greenhouse gas and a powerful one, but also can go right into the water cycle. But there's potential for that to actually come of age in the next few years. That's gonna take a lot

of work. I mean, you're talking about building out an entire infrastructure to support a fleet of vehicles for a nation as large as the United States. That's a multibillion dollar effort you're talking about. But it doesn't mean that it won't happen. It just means that it's very expensive and it's going to be Uh. It's it's not gonna be an easy, easy road to go down. I'm sorry about the pun I didn't intended when I started. A little sorry. There's also the development maybe we go back

to using more diesel vehicles that are running on biofuels. Uh. We do use some biofuel in gasoline powered vehicles, ethanol, for example, but bio diesel is something that could also be uh an alternative. It may not mean that everyone will be driving it, but it might become a viable option, or algae powered cars. Yeah sure, yeah, no, it's switch grass powered cars, you know, this kind of idea. And also just improvements in aerodynamic design cutting down on air

resistance can really help on fuel economy as well. Obviously that's not something you can do with your vehicle once you bought it at you just want to add as many spoilers as possible. Also, paint your vehicle read because everyone knows the red ones go faster. Yeah. Yeah, but

those are your general approaches. Like there may be something, you know, monumental that gets developed over the next few years that really affects fuel economy, but for the most part, we're looking at small incremental improvements that can be seriously boosted by consumer behavior. So this is something that you really can have a personal effect on that that's going to you're you'll see it reflected in things like how much money you're spending per month on fuel. So it's

a good thing to to talk about. You guys, have anything else you want to add about fuel economy. I predict to the cars of the future will be powered by winged pegasy is that that draw them with leather straps? Excellent? I look forward to that. On a molecular level, I completely agree with you, molecular Pegass. I was totally down with Mr Fusion, but I guess I'm outvoted Pegasus. It

is all right. So guys, if you agree with Joe's assertion that soon mythological creatures will power all of our vehicles, let us know so I can put you on a list. I didn't say all, Oh, I'm sorry. I apologize. Don't mean to put words Toro. Alright, So guys, if you have anything you would like to add to this conversation, go to f w thinking dot com. That is the website where you're gonna find all of forward thinking. We've got videos, we've got blog posts, we've got podcasts, we've

got articles. We've got a lot of great stuff there that you can need to check out, and we will talk to you again really soon. We're more on this topic in the future of technology. This is forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places.