Fuel saving tips

With the cost of living rising every day, it is time to consider how much you are spending on fuel for your car. Ask yourself whether every drop of fuel that goes into the tank gives you real mileage. Do you fuel your car only to spend half of it in rapid accelerations and abrupt stops?


Let me explain a few principles that will perhaps help you save fuel if not making you a better driver.

THE LAW OF INERTIA

This law simply states that any physical object will resist change to its state of motion or rest. This tells you that a stationery object needs a lot of force to start moving and equally a moving object requires a lot of force to stop it from moving. Of course this force is relative to the size of the object. Thus it requires more force to move a bus from 0km/h as opposed to a Vitz. However irrespective of  the size of your car, you will always spend more fuel to start it moving from a complete stop as opposed to fuel needed to keep it moving. Again it will need more fuel to accelerate to a higher speed as opposed to accelerating to a lower speed and leveling out. Therefore a fuel saving tip here would be to try and minimize the number of stops you make. How can you minimize the number of stops? Start by anticipating the stops. Why should you accelerate all the way up to the traffic lights or the back of the track only to hit the brakes hard. Drive moderately on slow moving traffic and you will find yourself crossing the the traffic lights without stopping. The lights will always be green for you since you are not trying to beat them. So by the time you arrive at the next, it has also turned green. In fact as you near obvious stops like round-abouts and junctions, lift your foot of the gas pedal and let the car slow down naturally.


Once again if you are not on high speed, the energy spent breaking the car is less since the resistance to stop is not as high as when on high speed. Here you also have a direct saving on your break pads. They don't have to endure so much force.

WORK DONE

In Physics, work done equals the mass of a body multiplied by the distance travelling by that body. The point to note here is, two bodies that travel same distance but have different masses require different energy amounts to cover same distance. This very easily explains that your car will consume more fuel on a full boot than when the boot is empty. We all love travelling upcountry and filling our car boots with food items when travelling back to town. Do yourself a favour and make sure you get all items out of the boot before you resume the normal trips to office in your car. At this point your might consider co-sharing fuel costs with all your friends that you always give a lift in your car! You might also want to re-consider the wisdom of always having your tank full when on short trips like going to office and back. Do you really need all that load of fuel? Just make sure your fuel gauge does not fall below the quarter mark but certainly I wouldn't advocate for a full tank on office-to-home trips. Unless of course you have to drive 200km every day!

DENSITY

The time of day you fuel your car can determine the amount of fuel you get in terms of mass. The fuel pumps measure the fuel in terms of volume. Therefore on cold morning hours you will get more mass of fuel for the same volume since the density is high. V = m/d (V=volume, m=mass, d=density). Volume being constant, mass has to increase with increase in density in order for the pump to measure same volume. Unlike when fueling during hot afternoon hours, when the density of fuel is so low. This simply means you get a lighter load of fuel. certainly you will cover more mileage on a heavier load of fuel as opposed to a lighter one on the same price. Take this analogy, you have a glass full of raw popcorn seeds and another full of heated and puffed up popcorn seeds. They both have same volume but weigh completely different because of the parking density of the seeds.