[jdr]

I tried hypermiling on my 2002 Hyundai accent 1.5 petrol in Pune a little while back. I didn't know it was called hypermiling at the time.

Here's what I did:
1. I accelerated gently to required speed. Obtaining required speed is all guesswork; depending on traffic and grade and quality of road, etc.
2. After getting up to speed, I put the car in neutral (or sometimes in high gear just press the clutch (rarely, if I feel that I might need to quickly engage the engine)) and coast till speed drops to around 25-30kmph.
3. Repeat
4. All of the above was done with utmost concentration upon driving and watching the road. This is Pune after all, and you have all sorts of animals crossing the streets (including humans and other vehicles :P)

Here's what I didn't do:
1. I didn't switch off the engine everytime.
2. I didn't stick behind any other vehicle (not sure what it's called (tail gating?))

Gains:
1. Mileage went up from 11 to 14 (tried only once with one tank of gas)
2. With more practice, gains might go up to 15 (all city driving)

Observations:
1. The effort required to drive safely with the technique is not worth the gains in mileage
2. I won't be doing it again (did it once just for the sake of experimentation)
3. If mileage is your main concern, get a better mileage car or convert to cng

Jdr

[apachelongbow]

How about this? In the Safari, just not touching the accelerator (leaving the engine to idle), and changing gears, one can reach upto 50kmph in the 5th gear, now imagine driving like this all the time, I am sure the Safari will give upwards of 20kmpl!!!!
Note: The ECU compensates for slopes, speed brakers etc by increasing idling rpm to prevent an engine stall.

[sarathlal]

Slightly off topic, For Americans, more than the exorbitant nature, aren't they left without choice other than to stick to heavier and powerful cars?

Most of the freeways run through vast open space, where cross winds are extremely high. Small cars will be extremely difficult to control on such roads.
They opt for heavier and powerful cars for the sake of safety and the capacity to pull through extreme weather conditions, which includes high winds, sporadic hurricanes, extreme snow etc.

Nowadays, cars like Jazz, Beat etc are gaining entry into the US market, but they mostly are safe only as City cars.

[Rahul Rao]

I think that American cars are in efficient due to wrong choice of engine and gerbox options. My uncle had a Scoda octavia that returned upto 23 inspite of the size and weight, my much smaller Polo rarely does that. Driven with a light foot a BMW 520d returns 14 to 15 kmpl, but the smallest engine the 5 series is sold in the US is a 3 Lit.
Same is the case with almost all vehicles. Other than that the americans prefer a torqueconvertor autobox unlike manual or now DSG's preferred in Europe.

@ apachelongbow
Going from 1st 2 second without touching the accelerator is fine, but beyond that you should accelerate very lightly. I engage 5th at 50kph in my Polo, and the gear recommendation shows (5dot) but even a slight drop shows 4and a down arrow.

[supermax]

I happened to do some hypermiling on a recent trip, and thought I'd share my experience. My 2020 Skoda Octavia 1.0 TSI 115 returns about 15 km/litre on average in the city, and between 18 and 20 km/litre on the motorways, averaging 110 km/h. My family and I had traveled to Södertälje and Sundbyberg, near Stockholm in Sweden, to visit friends and celebrate Yugadi (Hindu New Year) at the Hindu temple there. Our journey back to Linköping was a 170 km drive from Södertälje, and we decided to do a non-stop journey, if my son dozed off, and that's exactly what he did. There was a light drizzle which turned into heavier rain, but I held a steady 100-110 km for the first 80 km of the trip. I was in the mood to see how efficient I could be, so decided to not engage cruise control at all. My friends in India may not think so, but my experience in driving in Sweden shows me that I get better fuel economy when I manage the speed myself, with a light foot, than with the cruise control on. The reason for this is mainly the rolling nature of the roads. When driving with a light foot, I don't always hold the exact 110 km/h when going up an incline. I maintain the gas and only add slightly more, not minding if my speed drops from 110 to say 98-100. Using the CC here would mean it aggressively accelerates to keep the speed up at 110, and this causes a lot of extra fuel consumption that the car cannot recover when the road flattens out. It also brakes slightly to prevent the speed from exceeding 110, when descending, and this is also something that I don't do, when I'm driving. I'm okay if the speed goes up a bit knowing that it's not a significant increase (<10% over the speed limit) and the additional momentum helps the car to glide up part of the next rolling climb easily.

After the first 80 km, I saw that the car was averaging 5.0L/100 km (20 km/l) and that's when I saw a tourist bus ahead of me doing a contant 103 km/h. I decided then to slot behind him for as long as our paths didn't diverge. I now chose to engage the cruise control, as I didn't want to be bothered with holding an exact 103 km/h speed or risk getting too close to the bus, or falling too much behind him. I maintained a gap of just over a 100 meters, rarely getting closer than that. If the gap grows more, the aero advantage steadily declines, but more importantly, cars that might overtake me might choose to slot in between the bus and me, if there was somebody behind them in a bigger hurry. Since the gap ahead of my was just right, those who overtook me also ended up passing the bus in the same move, before switching back to our lane. Hogging the overtaking lane is an offense that's punishable by a steep fine, so most people use the left lane only to pass, and then switch back as soon as it is safe to do so, i.e. ensuring adequate separation to the newly passed vehicle. A couple of times, the bus ahead of me had to make his own overtakes on cars with coupled trailers, which can't exceed 80 km/h on the motorways. When this happened, I generally coordinated my own pass so both the bus and I moved to the left lane too in lock-step, but on a couple of occasions, I was not able to move as there were cars approaching me from behind on the left lane, so I let them pass me, but planned my lane changes to get behind the bus again. In this way, I did a total of 86 km behind the bus, before I had to take the exit for my home city! By the time I pulled into my garage, the dash showed me that I'd averaged 4.7 L/100 km (21.27 km/L), my all time best on 110 roads.

Would I consider doing it again? Absolutely, if it's a bus that's holding a steady 100+ km/h, but not trucks which aren't allowed to exceed 90 km/h. The difference between 90 km/h and 100 km/h might not seem much, but it case of the former, it would mean way many more overtakes, and I really don't like people closing in on me, on the right lane, with a speed differential in excess of 20 km before they pass me. For this reason, buses are good, trucks, not so much. I have chosen to crawl behind a truck in extremely torrential rainfall once, but that was not for fuel economy as it was for plain survival; driving a safe distance behind the truck, but not passing it meant that I only needed to be able to see his taillights, instead of being able to see all of the road in the extremely heavy downpour.

I realized also on this trip that adaptive cruise control makes it really easy to hypermile behind buses. With my manual cruise control, I still had to click it up and down a few notches, in response to the bus ahead of me, to keep the separation a constant distance, something that an ACC would have done for me all by itself.

[shankar.balan]

First off, Hypermiling is decidedly NOT a new concept.
In the old days it used to be known as ‘slip streaming’ and was usually followed by cyclists behind a larger vehicle, so as to help save some ‘pedal effort’.

Nowadays, EV drivers use it, to extract max mileage/ range.

However, all things considered, in a land of rampant lane indiscipline and non-constant speeds, like India, this is near impossible to achieve consistently.

[antz.bin]

I don't know if this qualities as hypermiling but I was driving on my most familiar 200+km route (Nashik to Pune via NH60) yesterday.

Started at 7:50 AM.



This was clicked at exactly 9 AM yesterday in a car with an ARAI rated efficiency of about 25.4kmpl. Car was running with Auto AC set at 22 after driving about 70km. This was with a full load of luggage and 3 passengers.

It went up to 28.7kmpl but then I ran into road works on the Chandanpuri ghat which continued for over 10 kilometres. This ended up ruining my streak yesterday or I could have easily beaten the ARAI efficiency despite travelling 45km through morning Pune traffic.

What was I doing?

1. Running correct tyre pressures
2. Accelerating gently, using very little throttle
3. Sticking to the speed limit (90kmph)
4. Anticipating traffic by keeping a gap between myself and the vehicle in front
5. Looking far ahead to know hazards in advance so as to not brake too much

These are just good highway driving practices. So It didn't take me any extra time to achieve over the usual throttle heavy trip where I achieve almost 15-20% lower efficiency.

Why did I do this?
My daughter was napping in the rear. Didn't want to wake her up so was driving extra smoothly

[Heykush]

Just a Honda idtec thing here



This is Wrv 2017 Diesel which returns a constant 26-28 kmpl all the time on odo without any hyper milling

*Car is driven on 80% highways and 20% in city traffic with light foot