Saturday, January 6, 2007

How to get 180 mpg (or use only 1.3 L of gas for every 100 km)

Wayne Gerdes can take an ordinary car and do some amazing things with it. No, he is not a stunt driver. He's just an ordinary guy. But just by changing his driving habits, he can get extraordinary mileage from an ordinary car.

How would that help us, the ordinary citizen, out? According to the article in Mother Jones Magazine:

Less consumption of Mideast oil would also make our economy less susceptible to spikes in the price of opec oil, which have triggered U.S. recessions. More than half the gas we pour into our vehicles in America is imported, and we send more than $4 billion a week abroad to buy oil. If we all got a 25 percent improvement in fuel economy (far less than the 50 percent improvement that Wayne and his hypermilers routinely get), we could reduce by half the oil we import from the Mideast for our cars. And then there's global warming. "I'm not just doing this for myself," Wayne told me before we met. "I'm doing this for my country and the world."

You can read more about Wayne the hypermiler and his ability to get 180 mpg in this article, "This Guy Can Get 59 MPG in a Plain Old Accord. Beat That, Punk."

If you are interested in getting more information, here are three websites hypermilers like Wayne use:

cleanmpg.com

greenhybrid.com

priuschat.com

Some links I found of interest:

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Main_Page You must check out this site! A brilliant site dealing with the latest alternative energy solutions!

http://www.alternative-energy-news.info/ All sorts of cool news about alternative energy. But I don't think they've covered this method:

http://www.energynews.gr/ Which is from a Greek guy who proposes electric power generation and production from magnetic tapes.

http://www.bone2.com/kt/po/peakoil_project.htm The Peak Oil project- a Flash site with a comprehensive presentation of the issue of declining oil and rising prices.

http://www.ringsurf.com/netring?ring=EnergyWebRing;id=254;action=list If you want to check out various sites concerned with hypermiling, the peak oil problem, and alternative energy, this is the webring for the sites.