SUV's? Huge Trucks? Hypermiling Techniques???

The last time I check 'CleanMPG' over two years ago, I noticed the home page seemed to have a lot of pickup trucks. But I just checked and it looks like it defaults to current thread heads.

Perhaps one of CleanMPG illuminati might have a clue?

I wonder who we might send?

Bob Wilson

 

Whenever I've driven our daughter's Pilot I try to hypermile my guts out. Just basic stuff, keeping a good following distance, gentle acceleration, coasting up to slow-downs, always looking ahead, for reasons to take my foot off the gas. There's a lot of frustrations though, like an engine that won't shut down at stops for example.

 

I live in Texas, land of gas hogs.

Some of the small ones are as big as a Greyhound bus and probably smell like one too.

I'm going on vacation soon, need to see if I can rent a Prius or other hybrid. If not, I'm getting a small car and hope I don't get upgraded.

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

Why not take your Prius?

 

It's a two day drive or a two hour flight.

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

I don't know about truck or SUV, but we always had a minivan in our household. Our current minivan is 2005 Toyota Sienna AWD. With 3.3L V6 engine and being full time AWD, it has only 18 city / 24 highway mpg rating. Since our first hybrid car purchase 5 years ago, I have tried so hard trying to get Sienna to score better in mpg arena, but the best I could do was 24.2 on highway. Overall average last 5 years, mostly short trips in town, is 19.4 mpg. I just don't think those cars are made to be efficient, no matter what you do. Yah, you can make them much more inefficient, but the best you can hope for is the EPA rating, IMO.

 

That's not bad. With current EPA specs they rate the Sienna 4WD at 16 city / 22 highway.



from Compare Side-by-Side

 

Yeah, I did with a used (cheap) F150 supercab that I got for pulling a sailboat and haul motorcycles. I actually started using fuel saving tips during the shopping phase when I decided to look for a V6 5-speed manual model which are hard to find.

I replaced the off-road oriented tires with street types, major tune up (wires, plugs, filters, switched to syn. fluids (including gear box), and one of the biggest: electric fan mod. I used a scangauge to monitor, drove slowly, kept speeds below 60mph whenever possible, chose routes to eliminate as many stops as possible, and coasts in N or clutch in.

EPA is a (revised) 15mpg combined (17 originally) and I got it up to the 19-20mpg range. That doesn't sound like much but it was a HUGE 20-25% improvement (50mpg prius equiv.=62mpg); however, with a 25 gallon tank and $3+ gal back then fill ups were about $75-80 bucks.

 

But after experiencing what hybrid cars can do, it's hard to justify driving this minivan unless I am using to carry 7 passengers (which we rarely do now after kids are all grown up) or a full sheet of plywood (8x4 feets). For that reason, it has been driven less than 20K in the last 5+ years.

 

i've never been able to get our dodge dakota to budge over 17 mpg, using every trick in my repertoire.
and it doesn't matter whether it's highway or city.
i haven't tried driving like most of the rest of the public though, i wonder what result maniacal driving would return.

 

CleanMPG Coaxes 32 MPG from Ford F-150 EcoBoost Pickup - PickupTrucks.com News

That was for before the more efficient 2.7 Ecoboost was available. Wayne Gerdes has done reviews of other pick ups, including diesels.

The 2001 Ranger 2WD with 3.0L V6 has a revised rating of 15city/20highway/17combined. Ours was Trailhead package, which had larger wheels than the base 4WD, and a 4.0 differential ratio. I was returning 22 to 23 MPG on my commute.

 

When I was a regular at CleanMPG, Wayne would hypermile anything. He tried preaching to the Dinosaur crowd too, knowing full well that improved practices there would save disproportionately large amounts of fuel. But I don't believe that crowd paid anywhere near as much attention as we smaller car owners did.

Somewhere along the line, Ford even sponsored one of his long distance MPG stunts, taking a brand new version Ford Pickup coast to coast. And he produced great results.

Not the much of the pickup market paid attention. :-(

----
PS. Thanks Trollbait for finding (and beating me to) a link.

 

We were actually getting people looking to save fuel in their trucks at Gassavers.org. Some mentioned being greeted with "get a car" at other sites. Haven't seen any since the switch to Fuelly.

 

When I traveled extensively for work, I used to travel to Houston and at the National rental counter they always had a wide selection of pickups.

Grabbed a different brand until I had the 4 major ones covered. The best I did in flat Houston was in a Dodge Ram where 24 mpg was achieved.

The worst: the Toyota Tundra which I couldn't get over 18 mpg.

These were all straight v8 pickups no diesels.

Out here in the way home to smokey Fairfield this evening I was coal rolled 3 times by the diesel driving bumpkins .

 

My wife's company gave her a used (by the founder, his wife hated it) Tahoe SUV to drive. (They gave 'her' used Xterra to the janitor. Trickle down theory) It averages 15.5 MPG but I can get 18 MPG by using the fact that when decelerating or going downhill it has cylinder deactivation. (in effect, I 'glide' downhills and to a stop)

Just like a Prius, speed kills MPG. Choosing a slower route save more than 'gliding' on a faster route.

Since the company pays for fuel and maintenance, it does not save us any money to drive frugally, but I can't stop.

 

I have a 2000 Tundra V8 extended cab and I know I have got 25 mpg on long highway trips.
They have since made the Tundra larger to compete with the Ford F-250.

 

That's with the smaller v8 (4.6 L)? More recent versions have the 5.7L and IMO not designed with fuel economy in mind.

A couple of guys at work have tundras (one a 2008 and one a 2015). They both get about 13-16 mpg in them. The 08 has 170 k miles on it. That's a heavy fuel bill.

 

I see online they say 4.7L but close enough. My 2000 only has about 50K miles on it.
When we got it the dealer apparently did a trade and had it driven from Tennessee to Virginia. . It had about 500 miles on it when we bought it new. Now ask me why I dislike my local dealer.

 

I'm sure they gave you a great deal on it.

4wd version? If so with 500 miles on it new, I would have checked the underside for weeds in the suspension as the staff may have taken some off road liberties to better understand the Tundras fitness for service.

50k miles is just starting to break it in.

 

Nope 2WD with the option that had ABS & DRLs. On a Tundra forum, somebody asked how to disable the DRLs and they were told they needed to remove the ABS.

Actually the dealer did more. We initially wanted the no-charge bench seat. This truck originally came with the leather interior. The dealer had a 4WD Tundra wof the same color so they switched interior parts.
When I first drove our truck, it had a non-functional 4WD dash switch. I later had to take it back because the disable air bag switch key switch did not fit my key.