Dieting Cars

[theheretic]

Hypermiling aside, the easiest way to improve your gas mileage OTHER THAN going lighter on the pedal is to remove excess weight from your car. I'm sure you're carrying stuff you don't need in there. When I recently cleaned out J's car, I found 40 lbs of books she hasn't needed in a year, and some rocks and various clumps of paper, partially filled

Comments

[fortyozspartan]

It feels like you are over-rreacting here. Most people don't have the time, know-how, or the desire to seriously modify their cars.

"I removed my front seat and the lower part of the back seat to hold them all. It was lame having them in the garage, but the car was 50 lbs lighter"

Most people are unwilling to start removing seats because they probably have passengers ride in the car fairly frequently. If you're me, you live in an apartment and would have no where to put a car seat...

"what if I converted one of those cars to a ultralight one with replaced parts and a lot fewer fancy amenities? Could I live with it? Would gaining 3-5 mpg be worth it to me?"

I'm not really sure what amenities I could be taking out of my car at this point to reduce weight. I've already decided taking the seats out isn't a great solution.

"You might give up some crash safety but you'll save a lot of gasoline. And it still keeps the rain off."

With short-term vision, even if gas spiked up to $4/gallon this summer, that is only costing me around $200 more a year. That's assuming an average $4/gallon for the year. While, $200 isn't something I would wipe my ass with, it's a financial inflation I can absorb. It's unlikely that I'm going to take higher risks day in and day out just to save the money over the course of a year.

"Thing is, you really need to be a gearhead to pull this off."

And most people aren't...

Thing is, I don't have the mechanical know-how or the time to overhaul my car. Or the tools, or the space. That means I'm either buying a new car or paying someone else to do it. Both fairly expensive and both outstrip rising gas prices.

I live in Kentucky, and yeah I find it pretty ridiculous that most people around here drive pick-ups that get 17-22 mpg, but I also understand picking up a new car payment isn't really a good cost saving measure either. With rising gas prices, maybe I pay $17 more a month for gas, but it's still a hell of a lot cheaper than a 150-300 dollar new car payment.

Simple fact is, we may be lemmings running towards the edge, but in the immediate now reality, most Americans are playing the money game right. The way you talk makes the laws of supply and demand sound null. I mean, is the supply deceptively low such that the energy companies are keeping prices lower than they should be? If the energy crisis was essentially now (as seems to be the tone here), wouldn't prices be going up exponentially almost constantly?

[theheretic]

For a year, the price of oil doubled but the price of gasoline barely moved 80 cents. There's something wrong with that. It seems they fiddled the refineries to produce more gasoline and less diesel and heating oil and other products. This kept the price artificially low during an election year. After the election the price rose steeply for a while, then bounced around a bit. Now we're in another election year and the price has risen because oil is higher than ever, though its down $8/bbl this week and if this sticks we could be enjoying another lull in the weird surges and panics that seem to be controlling things. I don't expect to see $3.50/gal gasoline again but I could be proven wrong.

The saddest thing is that since people won't change to deal with these prices caused by shorted production out of the oilfields, they aren't carpooling and they aren't riding motorcycles. I won't even consider public transit myself. Its a sick joke, and we've got BART. When there's no gasoline, there will be no diesel to run the buses and blackouts are a possibility as well, though I found out a major powerplant in the area is on natural gas so maybe not.

As best I can tell, the energy crisis is slow enough that you have to think about "last year" to see the big changes. Prices go up but they're slow enough that people adjust bit by bit. What if people in Kentucky rode motorcycles to work instead of trucks? Even Harley's get 45 mpg. Little 250 cc bikes get around 70 mpg. Just need street tires and deal with the rainy days and traffic. Imagine if you and everybody in the county rode motorcycles for their work commute for the summer. You'd use 1/3 to 1/4 the gasoline and feel better at the same time.

Motorcyclist friend of mine told me that a contest in the 1980's found you can modify a Harley Davidson 1000cc engine to get 100 mpg by reducing the RPMs and using fuel injection to lean out the mixture. Cooling will be another issue, which they handled for this, but they did get surprising mileage with pretty primitive equipment. If you knew that gasoline prices would go up a $1/gal per year, would you switch to a motorcycle for your dry-day commutes? I think I would.

[fortyozspartan]

"If you knew that gasoline prices would go up a $1/gal per year, would you switch to a motorcycle for your dry-day commutes? I think I would."

I would become a bad ass bicyclist. My work isn't so far away that it wouldn't work...