Cruising along at 65 mph

My younger sister noted recently that I’m a slow driver. Me? No. Slow drivers are boring follow-the-rules, over-the-hill types. Yet it was true. I hadn’t felt like I was driving slow because I was used to driving 65 mph but to her it felt like she was driving with our mother, who I would silently will to drive faster when I was late for soccer practice as a teen (sorry mom, I see your wisdom now).

I had picked up my sister from the Ontario airport and we were driving 50 miles to my older sister’s house. I had set the cruise control to 65 to get better fuel efficiency, which I’ve been doing since the spring when gas prices shot through the roof and I was trying to save on gas and do something good for the environment. She hadn’t heard that the slower you go, the better gas mileage you get so realizing I had an engaged (or trapped, depending on how you look at it) audience, I told her about my efforts to drive 65 mph and how it had increased my fuel efficiency. Instead of filling up after four 60-mile round-trip work days, I could get through the five-day work week without filling up. And if I didn’t drive a lot on the weekend I could go a whole week on one tank of gas.

I wrote about this when I first made the discovery but hadn’t returned to it since. Then I read an article from Saturday’s LA Times Business section, "Memories of a road trip, driven by the price of gas," about how the writer saved on gas during a cross-country trip in his minivan. He got 26 mpg instead of the 19 mpg it should get according to the EPA. He and his wife swore by the "under 65" strategy and only used AC when it was completely necessary. His main point: "... on my road trip I discovered there’s more to fuel economy than the numbers on a window sticker might imply, that even with gas prices creeping steadily downward, saving gas is a good idea, and that there are more rational ways to deal with volatile fuel costs than borrowing from your 401(k) to buy a Prius."

For those of us (myself included) who can’t justify the extra costs of a Prius, we can still do good for the environment by changing our habits, which doesn’t cost a dime (and even saves money), and is a simple and effective way to decrease our impact on the environment. Instead of saying "Well I’m not installing solar panels or buying a hybrid so oh well," it’s a reminder that small changes add up.

I liked the statistics the writer, Ken Bensinger, included in his article:
–Driving at 65 mph burns up 10% more gas than at 55. That jumps to 25% at 75 mph. Also, reaching 65 mph from a standstill requires 40% more energy than getting to 5 mph, so driving at a constant speed is much more efficient than starting and stopping.
– We’ve all heard of rolling down windows on surface streets and using the AC on the highway but the AC isn’t as much of a gas guzzler as you’d think. With the AC on, their fuel economy dropped by only slightly more than 1 mpg. "On particularly aerodynamic cars, opening windows can result in as much as a 20% drop in fuel efficiency, compared with only a 5% to 10% penalty for using the AC."
–Most interestingly, gas containing ethanol gets worse fuel economy than regular unleaded, another drawback to ethanol. Gas with 10% ethanol decreased his fuel efficiency by 9%.

Sure, it’s not possible to drive a slow 65 mph or less all the time but I’ve found that I can use cruise control for at least half my commute to work, after a get on the freeway and before traffic tightens near downtown. It may feel like you’re driving slowly at first, but once you start noticing that it does save gas, maybe more people will do it.