12 Tips to Better Fuel Economy

Tip 11: Cutting Corners, Cutting Gears

Manual cars already enjoy a slightly better fuel economy than the equivalent car with an automatic gearbox.

There is a technique called block gear changing that can assist drivers of manual cars to further improve fuel consumption. It will require some practice.

Block changing is where you carefully skip gears when changing up through the gears. As an example, you may go from 1st to 3rd to 5th, skipping 2nd and 4th gears.

The key is to make sure that you don’t go too high up in the rev range in the lower gear, or too low down in the upper gear. If you go too high in the lower gear, then excess petrol is consumed for marginal benefit. If you go too low in the higher and the engine will labour and consume more petrol.

With newer cars with 6- and 7-speed boxes, block gear changing is much easier. This technique is commonly used by motorcyclists.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 10:15 am and is filed under Fuel Economy, Saving Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.