[Greenbuilding] Driving technique, was: What car do you suggest?

[Reuben Deumling]

A fun read from Mother Jones magazine a year ago (when gas was cheap:-))

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This Guy Can Get 59 MPG in a Plain Old Accord. Beat That, Punk

Drafting 18-wheelers with the engine off, taking death turns at 52 miles an
hour, and other lessons learned while riding shotgun with the king of the
hypermilers

Dennis Gaffney

January/February 2007 Issue

on a midsummer saturday in a sprawling wisconsin parking lot, about a dozen
people are milling about a candy-apple red Honda Insight. They're watching
Wayne Gerdes prepare for his run in Hybridfest's mpg Challenge, a 20-mile
race through the streets of Madison. Wayne is the odds-on favorite to win
the challenge, in which drivers compete to push the automotive limits not of
speed and power—a desire those gathered here consider old-fashioned and
wasteful—but for the unsexy title of Most Fuel-Efficient Driver in the
World.

Wayne is believed to be that driver, but he's nervous, because all day long
the hypermilers—the term Wayne invented to describe the band of brothers who
push the limits of fuel efficiency—have been getting crazy-high
miles-per-gallon readings, as much as 100 mpg. For the race, he's borrowed a
buddy's Insight and, in order to decrease the car's mass, jettisoned
everything that's not screwed down. Car detritus—a pillow, towels, cleaning
supplies, a tool kit—sits neatly on a blanket on the macadam.

What can't be jettisoned is Wayne himself, who at 6 feet 1 inch and 210
pounds looks too big to fit into this tin can two-seater. ("I would love to
lose 60 pounds," he tells me, "because it would help my mileage.") In
Wayne's world, fuel efficiency is not about the car. It's about the driver.
Wayne doesn't get high mpg marks by tinkering with engines or using funky
fuels or even, most days, by driving a hybrid. He gets them by driving
consciously—hyperconsciously. He takes out his wallet and his keys. Then he
removes his sneakers. "We'll put them on eBay," cracks one of the onlookers.
"He's speeding," someone says as Wayne exits the parking lot. "Look at him
go." Wayne is doing no more than 15 miles per hour. Before he's out of
sight, though, he turns a full loop on the exit road to slow himself down,
so he doesn't have to brake at a traffic jam ahead. Wayne hates braking.

Forty-five minutes later, Wayne is still driving the bucolic 20-mile course
when raindrops as big as marbles begin falling and winds send trash hurtling
across the parking lot. Everyone runs for cover, and I jump into a Toyota
Prius owned by one of Wayne's hypermiling buddies, Dave Bassage. Puddles and
high winds are a hypermiler's nightmare. "Nature's putting on its own energy
show," says Bassage, watching the blasts of lightning through his
water-splattered windshield. "This pretty much screws Wayne."

two nights earlier, on a clammy 80-degree Chicago evening, I wait for Wayne
at the curb at O'Hare International Airport. I first see his technique as
the car he's driving, a 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid, pulls over to pick me up.
Drifts over, actually, like a jellyfish. Around Wayne is madness in motion:
Drivers in four lanes are accelerating hard, weaving erratically, or
grinding to a halt. To Wayne, these are the driving habits of the ignorant
and the wasteful—which is to say, nearly all of us. Wayne's car glides to a
stop as if it has run out of gas. Wayne has stopped without braking.

The car is owned by his friend Terry Honaker, who, with his wife, Cathy, is
along for the ride. Inside it's hotter and even more humid than outside. As
we take off—or, more accurately, as the vehicle rolls forward really
slowly—I notice that all four windows are closed and the AC is off. I'm
sitting in one of the most technologically advanced cars in the world, and
it feels like I'm trapped in a fanless tollbooth in Biloxi, Mississippi, in
August. We take the interstate to Wayne's house. The speed limit is 55, and
most of the traffic is zipping past at 75 or so, but Wayne hovers around 50
mph. He's riding the white line on the right side of the right-hand lane.

"Why are you doing that?" I ask from the backseat. "It's called
ridge-riding," he explains, using another term he's invented. He ridge-rides
to let people behind him know that he is moving slowly. I imagine it's also
a way to avoid dying plastered to the grill of a semi. Ridge-riding, Wayne
explains, saves gas in the rain, as it gets the wheels out of the puddly
grooves in the road created by more, let's say, traditional drivers. "People
are burning fuel to throw water in the air," he says, adding that you can
hear if you're driving in the road's grooves or out of them. That's
interesting, but I'm having a hard time concentrating, because my back and
butt are beginning to stick to the seat. "Is anybody a little warm in here?"
I ask.

I don't think Wayne hears me, because, as a Chevy Tahoe whizzes by, he
notes, "I imagine that it's getting 10 to 13 miles per gallon climbing this
hill. We're getting about 80. It'll drive you crazy." I'm thinking that
hypermiling consists of driving like a 90-year-old in a mobile sweat lodge,
but I'm about to find out I'm wrong. Really, really wrong.

"Buckle up tight, because this is the death turn," says Wayne. Death turn?
We're moving at 50 mph. Wayne turns off the engine. He's bearing down on the
exit, and as he turns the wheel sharply to the right, the tires squeal—which
is what happens when you take a 25 mph turn going 50. Cathy, Terry's wife,
who is sitting next to me in the backseat, grabs my leg. I grab the door
handle. As we come out of the 270-degree turn, Cathy says, "I hope you have
upholstery cleaner."

We glide for over a mile with the engine off, past a gas station, right at a
green light, through another green light—Wayne is always timing his speed to
land green lights—and around a mall, using momentum in a way that would have
made Isaac Newton proud. "Are we going to attempt that at home?" Cathy asks
Terry, a talkative man who has been stone silent since Wayne executed the
death turn in his car. "Not in this lifetime," he shoots back.

Wayne is paying attention to the road, not the banter. He's had to turn the
engine back on earlier than he usually does after taking the death turn. "I
hit the turn at 50, 51," he says. "I should have hit it at 52."

i stay at wayne's home, part of a modern suburban development between
Chicago and Milwaukee on Lake Michigan's western shore. It's not the kind of
place where people drive compact cars, much less hybrids. "There's a Hummer
over there," Wayne says after we step inside, pointing to a neighbor's house
beyond his microwave. "And there's a Hummer over there," he says, pointing
past his TV, the largest flat-screen I've ever seen outside of a sports bar.
In the kitchen with us is Hobbit—he prefers that to his real name—another
visitor who is staying at Wayne's house while attending Hybridfest. Hobbit
has a patchy beard and a braided ponytail and travels in bare feet. He looks
and thinks like the ecoradical you might expect a hypermiler to be and
confesses he's surprised by Wayne's home and lifestyle. "I thought you'd be
living like a college student," he says.

Unlike most hypermilers, the most fuel-efficient driver on the planet
doesn't own a hybrid. He sold his Honda Insight two years ago and bought a
2005 Accord for the luxury of power mirrors, heated leather seats, and a
state-of-the-art navigation system. He uses the Accord for a hellacious
two-hour commute to the Braidwood Nuclear Power Station, where he works as
an operator. His wife drives a 2003 Acura mdx, a seven-seater with a
3.5-liter V-6 engine that advertises itself as "the suv benchmark." Wayne
also owns a 2003 Ford Ranger, which he used to haul 5,000 pounds of lawn
care equipment when he had a landscaping business on the side. He's also
proud of his Exmark Laser Z sit-down mower. "I can mow an acre a gallon," he
says.

The morning after I arrive, Hobbit and I squeeze into the front seat of the
Ranger to join Wayne on a milk run. He starts the truck—well, gets it
rolling—by releasing the emergency brake and putting the gearshift in
neutral before jumping out and pushing the 3,330-pound vehicle down his
sloping driveway with the engine off. He jumps in and, without braking,
turns right, swerves around a dead skunk in the road, and then takes a left
turn—again without braking—to a stop sign. Ahead, the light is red. "This is
a long light," he says. "I'm screwed. We have to throw it away." "Throw it
away" is the phrase Wayne uses to describe what most of us do with gasoline.
We throw gas away when we accelerate fast, when we turn on the air
conditioning, when we leave heavy stuff in the trunk, when we drive with a
roof rack, when we don't change the oil, when we underinflate our tires,
when we roll down the windows, when we speed, when we brake, or when we
idle. Wayne might seem a radical at times, but he's really a conservative:
He doesn't want to throw anything away.

Even parking is not a routine matter with Wayne, as I learn when he chooses
an isolated spot in the strip mall lot. "This is potential parking with a
face-out," he says. Potential parking, Wayne explains, is when you park at
the highest spot in a parking lot. That way, you rely on gravity to get
going rather than on the ice—the acronym Wayne uses for the internal
combustion engine. A face-out is like it sounds: facing out into the open
lot, allowing a driver to avoid backing up, braking, and then moving
forward. "Nobody uses it," he says, "but they darn well should. It's a
nearly empty parking lot, and you see people jammed in nose to nose. It's
screwed up."

As we're driving out of the parking lot, Wayne comes to the top of a small
hill and tells me he's doing a fas. "What?" I ask. "That's a forced auto
stop," he says, which is putting the car in neutral, turning off the engine,
and gliding. It's illegal in some states—with the engine off, you can lose
your power brakes after a few pumps, and with older cars, you can lose your
power steering—but it's a favorite driving tool of many hypermilers.

Wayne loves acronyms almost as much as he loves FE (that's fuel economy).
d-fas is a "draft-assisted fas," which means fasing while you're tailgating
an 18-wheeler to reduce air resistance. dwb means "driving without brakes,"
which is not really driving without brakes—even Wayne doesn't do that—but
driving as if you don't have brakes. P&G is a pulse and glide, which I still
don't understand, but Wayne defines it in his notes for his Hybridfest
presentation this way: "In a nutshell, it includes a fas in many hybrid and
non-hybrid automobiles to a lower target speed (some hybrids can be
influenced into this mode of operation with the right application of
multiple accelerator pedal inputs), reigniting the ice, re-engagement of the
tranny with the rev match, and re-acceleration to a higher target speed,
repeat." Got it?

On the way home, a woman in a generic gray sedan zips around Wayne trying to
catch a green light, but she's too late. The light turns red and she slams
on the brakes. "That made no sense," Wayne says. "Now she's all pissed off
too," Hobbit says. "She's sitting there with the car running and she's going
to tear out of here," adds Wayne, who is sitting up the hill a bit from the
light, with the engine off. Of course, that's just what she does. (One study
found that jackrabbit starts and hard brake stops reduce travel time by only
about 4 percent—that's 75 seconds on a 30-minute trip.) As we approach the
right turn back into his subdivision, Wayne, in a fas, coasts down to 30
mph, then to 25 mph, letting inertia do the job of his brakes. Three cars
are bunched behind him, and a guy in a Ford Explorer honks. "They can honk
all day," Wayne says. "My turn signal's been on for the last eighth of a
mile." The guy in the Explorer passes, shooting Wayne an exasperated look.

Although Hobbit has great respect for Wayne, he attempts to distance himself
from what Wayne is now doing. "I don't consider myself a hypermiler in this
sense, because, um… " Hobbit struggles to express himself delicately. "I try
to conform to the traffic much more than he does. There's a big difference
there. I'm sure it will show in the mileage numbers." As Wayne pisses
another driver off, Hobbit gives up on diplomacy. "At some point, the
survival instinct and trying to be courteous on the road comes into play,
too."

Wayne finally makes the turn. It's not the death turn of the previous night;
it's a mini-death turn. "Because you guys are in the cab, and I've got milk
in the back," Wayne explains, "I can't take the corner very fast."

wayne's driving obsession began after 9/11. Before then, he drove "75 miles
per hour in the left-hand lane," but in the wake of the attacks he vowed to
minimize his personal consumption of Mideast oil. As he sees it, Osama bin
Laden and Al Qaeda received their operating funds from all the U.S.
consumers who bought Saudi oil. That money paid for the construction work
that made bin Laden's family rich. "If Osama bin Laden didn't have the money
to burn," Wayne says, "he wouldn't have been able to do what he did. There
was a direct relationship between our addiction to oil and the World Trade
Center coming down."

Less consumption of Mideast oil would also make our economy less susceptible
to spikes in the price of opec oil, which have triggered U.S. recessions.
More than half the gas we pour into our vehicles in America is imported, and
we send more than $4 billion a week abroad to buy oil. If we all got a 25
percent improvement in fuel economy (far less than the 50 percent
improvement that Wayne and his hypermilers routinely get), we could reduce
by half the oil we import from the Mideast for our cars. And then there's
global warming. "I'm not just doing this for myself," Wayne told me before
we met. "I'm doing this for my country and the world."

But driving with Wayne, you get the feeling it's not just about politics,
and that's confirmed when he tells me about his father. For 50 years, Robert
Gerdes has been writing down the mileage he gets from each tank of gas.
Wayne remembers the vacation his family took from Winthrop Harbor, Illinois,
to Florida when he was eight. His father drove the family car, a Buick
LeSabre, and hauled an 18-foot travel trailer loaded with camping gear. The
Buick got seven miles per gallon on the trip. "Every time we hit a steep
hill it was, 'Whooooshhhh,' like the flushing of a toilet," says Wayne, "but
it was flushing fuel. I'll never forget that sucking sound of the
four-barrel carburetor. We visited Disney World, but I don't remember it."

in 2002, wayne bought a Toyota Corolla to replace the 1999 Nissan truck he
had been using for his daily commute to the power plant. Online, he saw that
"guys in Priuses were bragging about 44 mpg, and I was doing better in a
Corolla." But it was driving his wife's Acura mdx that moved Wayne up to the
next rung of hypermiler driving. That's because the suv came with a fuel
consumption display (fcd), which shows mpg in real time. As he drove, he
began to see how little things—slight movements of his foot, accelerations
up hills, even a cold day—influenced his fuel efficiency. He learned to
wring as many as 638 miles from a single 19-gallon tank in the mdx; he
rarely gets less than 30 mpg when he drives it. "Most people get 18 in
them," he says. The fcd changed the driving game for Wayne. "It's a running
joke," he says, "but instead of a fuel consumption display, a lot of us call
them 'game gauges'"—a reference to the running score posted on video
games—"because we're trying to beat our last score—our miles per gallon."

If people could see how much fuel they guzzled while driving, Wayne believes
they'd quickly learn to drive more efficiently. "If the epa would mandate
fcds in every car, this country would save 20 percent on fuel overnight," he
says. "They're not expensive for the manufacturers to put in—10 to 20
bucks—and it would save more fuel than all the laws passed in the last 25
years. All from a simple display."

since early in 2005, when gas prices rose past $2 a gallon, drivers all over
the country have become more attentive to fuel efficiency. But the
hypermilers set themselves apart in an event they refer to as the Prius
Marathon, which took place in Pittsburgh in August 2005. It was undertaken
by five men: Wayne; Dan Kroushl, an electrical engineer from Wexford,
Pennsylvania; Dave Bassage, a West Virginian who until recently worked for
the Department of Environmental Protection; Rick Reece, a geospatial analyst
from South Carolina; and Bob Barlow, a Virginia attorney. They had all met
online.

Kroushl got the idea after driving his Prius earlier that spring on a
15-mile portion of Route 65 near his home, when he was able to sustain 99.9
mpg, the highest reading that a Prius fcd can record. He posted what he had
done online and asked if anyone had a device that could record higher mpgs.
But nobody believed he had even reached 99.9. The car has a combined
city/highway epa mpg estimate of 55, and even hypermilers with Priuses were
only posting mpgs in the 60s and 70s. Kroushl wanted to prove the doubters
wrong, so he invited other hypermilers to Pittsburgh to run the same stretch
of Route 65—15 miles up and 15 miles back. Their goal was to break the
record for most miles on a tank of gasoline in a Prius, which was 1,316
miles, recorded by a Japanese driver, at 85.85 mpg. But the American version
of the car has a 12.8-gallon tank rather than the 15.9-gallon tank in the
Japanese Prius. That meant the five men would have to top the Japanese mpg
by about 20 percent, which would mean they'd have to sustain 100 mpg over 48
hours. Bassage described the event this way: "We're coming from all points
of the compass to have fun going nowhere for a whole weekend in Pittsburgh."

The hypermilers cracked 100 mpg in their first four four-hour shifts. Back
at their hotel, they posted fuzzy digital photographs of the Prius' fcds on
greenhybrid.com.

On their first round, the men posted mpgs in the low hundreds, but as they
drove, they talked on the phone, sharing fuel-saving tips with each other.
On Saturday, Reece got 114.7, and Kroushl reached 115. On Sunday, Wayne beat
120. "I'd be getting 105 miles per gallon," Bassage told me, "and thinking I
let down the team." By Sunday night, Kroushl, who had launched the endeavor,
was getting sick of driving, and his wife had made it clear she wanted him
to stop the nonsense and get home, so he began turning on the air
conditioner and the defroster, to drink up gas faster. "The 'low fuel' light
flashed for over nine hours," Bassage says. When the Prius, with Kroushl
driving, finally ran out of gas and rolled to a stop, the five men had
clocked 1,397 miles from just one 12.8-gallon tank of gas—a new record. They
had averaged 109 miles per gallon.

in order to reacquaint himself with the car he'll be driving the next day in
the mpg Challenge, Wayne borrows an Insight for the 120-mile drive to
Hybridfest. While Wayne drives, he reminisces about one of his
sweetest—meaning most fuel efficient—drives of all time, in his Honda Accord
last summer. "I was going about 70 miles per hour catching up with a truck,
in the late evening, and I had a tail wind. I went into a d-fas, down the
bowl over the top of a hill, and I coasted almost three and a half miles. It
ended at 40 miles per hour.... It was a once-in-a-lifetime. I'll probably
never experience it again. The hypermiling gods were with me."

I ask him what the equivalent feat would be for a baseball player. "Three
grand slams in a game," he says. A great home run hitter needs sharp eyes,
strong wrists, and exquisite timing. And a great hypermiler? "Foot control,
hand-eye coordination, and anticipation," he says. "It's like a moving chess
game, where the pieces aren't stationary." Like all transcendent athletes,
Wayne anticipates the action on the field—in his case, the road—before it
unfolds. "I'm making micro-adjustments on a continual basis," he says.

Fearlessness might be another trait that Wayne neglects to mention. At one
point in our drive, Wayne approaches a truck to ride its draft. The wind
whipping around the semi buffets the Insight, which weighs just 1,800
pounds. I offer Wayne some cashews, and as he takes a handful, his foot
comes off the pedal slightly and the Insight drifts a few car lengths back.
A black Infiniti suv squeezes between us and the truck. Wayne rides its
butt. The Infiniti moves back into the left lane and zips away. "We
pressured him so we could get our target back." I offer him more cashews,
but he declines. "I have to pay attention," he says. He creeps back toward
the truck. We're at two car lengths.... Wayne takes a call from some friends
in another car.... One car length.... I thump an imaginary brake pedal with
my foot, just like my mother used to do while riding with me. Wayne, not a
touchy-feely guy, puts his hand on my leg to reassure me.

A few minutes later, he slaps the wheel. "Damn. I forgot my ice vest." The
vest, which he uses at the nuclear plant when he has to work in really hot
rooms, "is kind of my secret weapon," he says. "You can drive at 95 degrees
with an ice vest, and it doesn't feel like 95." Wayne expects his car will
be extremely toasty during the mpg Challenge. "No electricity, no air, no
fans," he says. "No nothin'."

the three dozen men—no women sign up to compete—begin driving the 20-mile
course of the Hybridfest mpg Challenge at about 9 a.m. Wayne is the
favorite—"I have a target on my back," he says—and the star of the show.
"It's like he's a member of Kiss," says Tony Schaefer, a Hybridfest fan.
Wayne expects that his most serious contender in the mpg Challenge will be
Randall Burkhalter, the only driver to ever break one of Wayne's mpg
records. This summer he passed Wayne's 92.8 mpg lifetime average for the
Honda Insight, and his mark is now up to 95.4 mpg. Like many hypermilers,
the two met online at websites such as cleanmpg.com, greenhybrid.com, and
priuschat.com. Wayne finds Burkhalter in the hot midday sun after Burkhalter
has just finished his run, the best of the day: a 108.5 mpg average in his
Insight. Wayne slaps him on the back to congratulate him, calling him "the
top dog." Burkhalter thanks Wayne for all he's taught him, adding, "We're
the head-butters. We're the rams butting horns in the mountains."

A few minutes later, a shout comes from the finish line that there's a new
front-runner. His name is Justin Fons, and he's just 17 years old. He clocks
117.2 mpg in an Insight. Afterward, Justin explains that his father taught
him how to drive, but that "the person I learned to drive efficiently from
is Wayne Gerdes." By mid-afternoon, Mike Dabrowski, an inventor, tops
Justin's mark, finishing the course at 121.9 mpg. But Dabrowski has the
advantage of an extra battery in his Insight that connects to a fifth wheel
he lowers to the ground hydraulically from the rear axle—which is why the
other hypermilers call him "Mr. Fifth Wheel." Wayne doubts that it's
possible to beat 121.9 mpg with four wheels. As he's about to take the
course for the last run of the day, he tells the woman who signs him in that
she should write "Mike Dabrowski" in the winner's slot.

by the time Wayne enters the lot from his run, it's past 5 p.m., and the
other hypermilers have retreated from the storm and are off to Hybridfest's
happy hour. Wayne's cap is off and his head, soaking wet, is sticking out
the window because his breath has fogged up the windshield, and he refuses
to turn on the defroster. Wayne honks to get a judge to run through the rain
to record his fcd. It reads as high as the Insight can record: 150 mpg.
Afterward, the Insight's owner hits a switch that shows Wayne's mark in
kilometers per liter, which has a higher limit. It reads 1.3 L/100 km.
That's 180.91 mpg. Later, at the awards dinner, Wayne is presented with a
one-year subscription to Green Car Journal and a $25 gas card. For all we
know, Wayne's still using it.

ridge-ride vb to drive an automobile with one's right wheels touching the
right white line. Used to avoid puddles and excess friction and to alert
approaching vehicles that one is moving slowly.

d-fas: draft-as•sis•ted forced au•to stop

n a fuel-saving driving technique in which one turns off the engine and
tailgates a large truck in order to lower one's wind resistance.