r/hypermiling

Bought my Insight 2 years ago. I have averaged 61.8 mpg (3.8l/100km) over the 2 years of daily driving year round in West Michigan. I have put 70,000 miles (112,000 km) on the car, driving 35,000 miles a year on average. The Insight has made/saved me $18,000 over the 2 years.

I wanted to see just how efficiently a Kawasaki Ninja ZX-4R can be ridden when you completely ignore its designed use case and drive it like a car. Motorcylce is all factory state, no modifications.

avg fuel consumption at the end was 3.2l / 100km

data from Kawasaki rideology app

Distance: 179 km
Ride time: ~3 h 28 min
Average speed: 54.1 km/h
Median speed: 62 km/h
Average RPM: ~4,218 rpm
Median RPM: ~4,389 rpm
Maximum RPM: 6,661 rpm
Maximum speed: 84 km/h
Time in 6th gear: ~34%
Mean piston speed at average RPM: ~5.5 m/s

Mostly small countryside roads with ~40mph speed limits and city.

I don’t have a picture but my personal best was 178 miles.

For most of my driving (short distances) I avoid highways, since going above 50mph has a huge effect on the autonomy.

For longer trips, I set the cruise control to 55mph and get about 110 to 120 miles of range.

I have low rolling resistance tires, they are very stiff and not that comfortable compared to the alternatives I tried but the results speak for themselves.

Winter is rough in this car, it wipes half of the range.

I don’t drive very much and only had to use public charging stations 3 times in my two years of ownership. I don’t need to hypermile to get to my destinations (heck, I don’t even pay for electricity) but I like seeing big numbers on the dashboard.

Finally did 1000 km on one tank and still had about 4 L of fuel (E10 petrol) left.

Fuel consumption was about 4 L/100 km (58.8 MPG).

Low fuel light engaged at about 990 km.

AC was switched on for the entirety of the 1000 km, due to very hot weather.

Car is a Peugeot 208 II 1.2 PureTech with 101 HP.

With more optimal conditions regarding the route, I reckon that one could drive even more efficient.

Drove alot of highway trying not to go over 110kmph. Little to no slipstreaming n stuff. Raised the tire pressure on these big tires beforehand, no ac.
Can’t take fancy pics of my dash cause it doesn’t tell me much haha. Outcome is in km/l. 56mpg us. Recon I could do a lot better if i tried 😁

Hi Reddit,

Warning app promotion ahead...

Going by my numbers I’m not a hypermiler, just someone who hates wasting increasingly expensive fuel

Over the years I have learned a lot from following hypermilers and trying some of the safer techniques. I appreciate getting a bit further on each tank, but really the science of it all fascinates me

Earlier in the year  I purchased a bluetooth OBD adapter to chase an engine code on my daughters car. Probably a mistake, but the bug bit and sent me down a rabbit hole of analyzing data

I have been able to dial my car and driving a lot better, and the results are surprising to me. 
For example I have used pulse and glide a fair bit, however I have been able to show that for my car - a Subaru Legacy with a CVT trans - steady state is consistently better
There are speeds "islands"where mileage peaks, one around 80kph and another around 100kph - its not a linear relationship at all
The other really significant  finding was how dramatic a difference coasting makes when approaching speed changes and stops. Logically this make perfect sense. The momentum in my car would carry it for the good part of a kilometer from 100kph on the flat

I started wondering whether you could work out when it actually makes sense to lift off — not just “coast more”, but when to coast so you don’t slow down too early, end up having to accelerate again, or annoy everyone behind you

So I’ve been building an Android app called EcoDrive

The idea is that it learns how your actual car behaves — how quickly it loses speed, how well it carries momentum etc. It uses the road data ahead and shows you how far you would coast. Worked fantastic on level roads...I got a bit carried away (again) and have built a custom map set that includes road slope. At the moment I’ve only processed and released for NZ, Australia and Great Britain, mostly because that’s where the friends/family testing live. If there’s enough interest elsewhere I can add more, although they take a silly long time to process

Once my local map set was done for testing I realized estimating engine power, BSFC and cruise efficiency were easy to infer from OBD data
An OBD adapter isn’t really required, without one you still get the core coast/glide prediction. The OBD data lets it learn and analyse a lot more

I’ve finally got it onto the Play Store and I’m at the stage where I really need people who actually think about this stuff to tell me what I’ve got right, what I’ve got completely wrong, and what would make it genuinely useful

I figured r/hypermiling was probably one of the better places to ask

Happy to explain how any of it works if anyone’s interested. And critique is very welcome — I’d much rather hear “this is crap because…” now than spend more time creating something crap!

If anyone wants to have a play the link is: here

Making good progress on my hypermiling, can now consistently get below 4.2L/100km. Main thing, I improved my gear shift timing, and use cruise control a lot more. Will be starting a longer commute in a month so hopefully can maintain this efficiency.

Seat Leon mk2 1.9 TDI 105, all the journey with the limiter set at 110km/h.

There is somethinf about this 20 years diesel engines thats imposible to replicate now a days, simple mechanic but nice resulta.

(i had just reset my tripmeter then got on the freeway i just didn’t know it could go that high lol)

Modified Skoda Octavia vRS Petrol with 320HP. Drove normal so max 130 kph on the Motorway. The lowest i managed was sub 5L when i went to lago di Garda sadly i dont have a Picture of it.

Love the car. Superb hybrid system. About 40% highway 60% city.

Ford Focus mk4 1.5 ecoblue 6mt.

Knocks out 1200 km on a 47L tank

80% highway driven at 100-120 depending on the hilliness.

Full tank of gas.
3 round trip commutes in and out of Manhattan later.

20km commute from work in mild traffic. Highway was slightly downhill. LCD dying.

2016 Hyundai Elantra GT, base trim with automatic transmission and Eco mode. On the instant gauge the mpg bar drops below 25 every time I go up a hill. Last fill up today was 11.6 gal (13.2 gal tank) and cost me almost $47 ($3.99 9/10 /gallon).

I want an EV so damn bad. Yeah there aren’t a ton of places to charge in New Hampshire but it’d be cheaper than spending almost (and sometimes over) $50 every time I fill up my little car.

36.9km/L, 2.7L/100km, 86.8mpg(US), 104.2mpg(UK)

2014 Toyota Aqua (JDM Prius C)

Conditions: Cold start from 10°C (50°F). Flat elevation (Christchurch, New Zealand).

Route: 7.8km (4.8mi) trip. Really short. I have to average out the engine's fuel-hungry warm-up period.

50km/h speed limit with four 30km/h school zones along the way. Average speed 26km/h (16mph). Traffic flow and lights were all favourable. The car's momentum took me most of the way.

For context, I normally only get ~30km/L (3.3L/100km, 70mpg(US), 84mpg(UK) driving to work in winter. I only see this kind of fuel economy in summer where the ambient temperature is higher and the engine takes noticeably less time to warm up and enable EV driving.