Be Responsible. Save Fuel. Save the Environment.

Driving Tips to Improve your Car’s Mileage

In today’s era where traffic is beyond belief and fuel prices are soaring at lightening speeds, it is not only recommended but is critically important to drive around in a much more fuel efficient manner. Here are few pointers which will help you reduce the cost of traveling:

Lighten your load: Don’t take it literally as wearing no clothes is not what I meant. This actually means that you must get the lightest possible car which will fulfill your needs. And when you do that, never carry unwanted stuff that you don’t or rarely use. This is because weight of the entire car will eventually decide how fuel efficiently you drive around. Logging unnecessary weight around only makes the car work harder to move which requires more fuel.

Cruise it out: Try and drive your car in a smooth manner without much throttle variations. The more the variations, the more the car has to work hard which eventually uses more fuel. Let me put it in a simpler manner - when you jog, you do that on a consistent speed which makes you last longer at workout. However if you keep on changing your speed while jogging/running, the distance you travel won’t be that much.

Use Cruise Control: Cars equipped with cruise control will help improve the mileage as well as when enabled, it keeps your car at a constant speed without any driver inputs on the throttle.

Avoid Braking whenever possible: Brakes, as we know are what we rely on to escape a collision of any sort. However, braking when you don’t really need it, wastes the energy that was spend by your car to get you to that speed. For example: if you see a traffic light turning red ahead of you, don’t accelerate and reach the tail of the traffic and then brake vigorously, instead try and coast your vehicle in gear till the time you reach the tail, and then apply the brakes slowly.

Maintain a safe driving distance: Don’t stick to the bumper of the car as if you are really excited to see that rear end. Instead, try and keep at least a 100 metres of distance from the car in front. In this case, if the car in front of you slams on the brakes, you have some distance to coast your car down and apply the brakes slowly.

Avoid idling: Keeping the engine running when you are not moving is called idling. If you avoid idling, it will save you a considerable amount of money. Avoid idling if you know that you are going to be stationary for more than 10 seconds.

Narrow Tyres: Select the narrowest possible tyres for your car as having big fat tyres increases the amount of friction between the tyre and the road and because of that, your engine has to work harder to get you along.