ALT-1 What Reduces Fuel Economy
When we look at the amount of fuel we burn in our vehicles there are several factors to look at and i will look at some of the more important one in my article here.The first we will look at is driving habits. If we drive our vehicle mostly in the city then we first should look at the route to take that has the least amount of stops, since we burn most of the fuel on starts from a stop. When coming to a traffic stop we should coast our vehicles from a further distance to avoid having to coming to a complete stop before the light changes. The other thing is when we do stop and have to start from a complete stop we should start off slow with as little gas pedal as possible to get up to speed and when we do get to speed stay steady with the gas and you will burn less.The next thing we will look at is tire pressure. Did you know that we can loose over 2 to 3 pounds of air every month in a good tire? Tire pressure of just 1 pound under inflation can cause us to loose 1 mile per gallon! When we get gas this is why it is important to check the air in our tires and I like to go to the high end of the recommended tire pressures. If we change to a different size tire than recommended by the manufacture we will change our speedometer readout and change our gas mileage also.Now that we looked at the 2 things that cause the most dramatic change in mileage we now look at tuning up our vehicles. When do we change our air filter or spark plugs or other tune up items? If all is well then change them when the manufacture recommends for harsh conditions. If you do not keep your vehicle in tune you can cause your car to run either too lean or rich that will affect engine performance and gas mileage.I want to mention also about this craze to modify our vehicles engines and removing the items you may deem unnecessary to have like a factory air filter system or exhaust system and lets not forget the suspension systems and rims and tires. All of these changes can cause gas mileage to deteriorate and some of the items like removing of emission components are illeagal. We do not need to remove these items to get better performance!
