Increasing Fuel Economy

Increasing Fuel Economy

Summary

Fuel consumption is a very simple thing 95% of the time (The other 5%, it's an engine problem!)

Calculating Miles Per Gallon

Before working out how to increase fuel economy, you need to work out how many miles you are getting to the gallon...

Fill the tank. When the pump stops automatically, the tank should be full

Reset the trip meter

Take the car on a run, driving as you would normally drive and on various types of roads. This is to prevent a bias towards 'town driving' or 'motorway driving'

Fill up again

MPG can be calculated by the following formula:

MPG = (M / L) * 4.54

where M is the distance covered and L is the number of litres of fuel you have had to fill up with.

Eg 200 miles covered, with 30 litres to refill the tank give an MPG figure of (6.67 * 4.54), which works out to just over 30 miles per gallon.

Check this figure against the figures listed on http://www.parkers.co.uk, and see if you are getting ballpark mileage...

Increasing Economy

Fuel consumption depends on 3 things, listed in order of likelyhood to reduce MPG:

Driver / driving style

Route taken

Engine condition

If you want to get better fuel consumption, there are no miracles, but you can simply accelerate slower (in all gears) and change up a gear when you think your engine can handle it.

Do NOT labour the engine by changing up a gear too early, otherwise you risk damaging it.

This is not always possible, but if you can, avoid driving around on roads that force you to use lower gears and start/stop constantly, and don't drive short journeys as that kills both your fuel consumption AND your engine. Also, avoid driving anywhere in neutral.

Not only is this illegal, but the fuel pump will continue to feed the engine with petrol to prevent it stalling. However, if the throttle is not being used and the engine revs are above 1500, the fuel pump is inactive, which will obviously increase mileage no end!

Then if you still get a bad MPG figure, get your engine tuned!

Adapted from a post originally submitted by eladuk