Tip of the week: Your milage may vary
Looks like I (at least these days) have a little more time for the famous tip of the week series: It is long known (at least should be), that proper use of manual transmission (in cars) can greatly influence fuel economy and reduce the gasoline consume. This is archived by not driving out each gear, and instead upshift “quickly” into the next higher gear.
At least in Germany this is even standard teaching during driving school. Using drive-now car-sharing BMW Mini Cooper in Berlin for some time now I was wondering about the higher than expected gasoline consume of up to 10 liter per 100 km in central Berlin’s stop-and-go traffic. With some careful monitoring of the momentarily and average petrol consume in the digital display of the dashboard I figured out, that I upshifted too quickly for the Mini. Turned out that not up-shifting too early and rather going a little over the 2000 rpm mark brought down the consume from ~10 liter to something below 7 liter per 100km, …
In case you want to do something for the environment (and your wallet - or in reverse order) some conscious driving, monitoring and adaption can easily save some 30%, or more, …
Sorry, those of you with automatic (torque converter) transmissions are not in the fuel saving game anyway, …
Your milage may vary.
