When you’re driving, especially on the highway, consider using cruise control. You should always try to drive at an even speed and use cruise control when possible to maintain your speed. If you constantly accelerate and reduce your speed can cause you to waste a third of your gas. So if you want to save gas and improve gas mileage, use the cruise.
Do you use cruise control when driving?
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Gotta love cruise control. Unfortunately my Mazda 3 is a standard and isn’t have cruise control. I really miss it when going on long trips. Thankfully the 3 is relatively good on gas – at least when compared to our Subaru Legacy. That AWD monster is a gas guzzler!
Subaru has done a TON to improve gas mileage. Our 2011 outback gets 6.9/9.5 city/hwy. Check out the US
Yes, I love using the cruise control on long trips. I can move my legs around and not get so tired. The other thing I do is use the cruise through known speed traps. It assures I am going the speed limit and I am not absentmindedly letting my speed creep up.
I always use cruise control on long trips. One holiday weekend, we went away to Santa Barbara (from Los Angeles), when a highway patrol officer pulled me over. When she said I was going too fast, I told her my cruise control was on. The reason I was puled over was I passed her. I got out of the ticket because of my cruise control. It saves gas, money and a ticket!
Nice tip! Just be mindful that on long trips, very hilly ones in particular, you might be better off using the pedal yourself going up hill. This is because the acceleration going up hills is quite great when using cruise control.
Wouldn’t the opposite be true going down the hill and everything would even out?
I did a bit of reading on this and there seems to be some debate. When you cruise down a hill, cruise will completely stop accelerating until you get down to the baseline speed. As a result, when you get to the next hill, you will have to accelerate harder to get up to speed. Conversely, you could evenly hold down the pedal, gain speed in the downhill and shed it in the uphill without changing the acceleration.
Some people said that the more even acceleration would equal to less fuel consumption while others said that it might matter on a diesel engine (which apparently the pedal more directly regulates the amount of fuel), but not on a gasoline engine so much.
I’m not sure what is true, but it is worth considering.
Brandon – thank you for looking into this. I guess our readers can decide. Seems like a “screwed if you do, screwed if you don’t” scenario.