Fuel mileage = Good Night’s Sleep

The cost of fuel is something we can control. The better our fuel mileage, the more money we keep in our pocket. 

Each time we stop or we use our engine brake, we use fuel.  When leaving from a dead stop, extra fuel is used to get up to speed. If we stop at the bottom of a hill or have to climb to get up to speed, we use more fuel.  When leaving from a complete stop or after slowing down, the easier we are on the throttle the less fuel we use.  

When in traffic anticipating what the vehicle in front of us will do, when we have to change lanes or get off of the interstate on an exit ramp, we can keep our speed steady or slow down gradually.  Looking ahead also lets us react to a problem before it becomes a problem.  A friend of mine once said that you can tell who is a good driver by the fact they'll never puts themselves in a predicament where they need to be a good driver.

Learning to get better fuel mileage through driving is an ongoing learning process.  There are always ways to fine tune how we drive and how we react and a lot of this comes with experience.  Recently Henry Albert  participated in the Run on Less event. One tip I heard was that when a trainer had a student, he would tape a toilet paper roll to the throttle and he expected that toilet paper roll to not be smashed when the student was done driving.  Reminds me of the old adage to drive as if you have an egg under your foot.

In our Cascadia, we can watch the bar graph on the dash for a quick readout of how we are doing as well as see our current fuel mileage which is pretty accurate when we figure miles driven.  Recently a Pedal Coach was added to our truck as another barometer to measure how we drive that works off of the ECM.  More on that in a later blog.

Over all, the better our fuel mileage, the better we sleep at night, the better our partner sleeps as we go down the road, and the less wear and tear on the truck.  Fuel prices are low now, but they will go up and our practice now will increase our profit in the future.