The Fuel Saving Driving Calculator is designed to help you work out the optimal speed for the maximum fuel economy in your car. The ultimate output is a neat ‘tax free income’ you get from driving at the right speed for your needs. It brings the whole Peak Oil/rampant speculation/economic meltdown muddle down to earth really. Good luck with selling the Hummer, by the way!
The cool thing about this tool is that you now have more weapons in your arsenal to help fend off the effects of higher gasoline prices! Armed with this information, you can now make whatever trade-offs you might need to your greatest advantage. For example, if getting the greatest possible savings is most important to you, you’ll want to drive at speeds that produce the lowest equivalent cost per gallon of gas compared to your normal driving speeds. If you want to save gas money and time, you’ll want to drive at speeds that give you the greatest equivalent “tax free” income compared to how you drive today.
That website is rubbish – only an utter moron would recommend using cruise control as a means of reducing fuel consumption! Now if they had mentioned coasting on the other hand… ;)
Here’s another calculator: try checking out the Drive $marter Challenge (www.drivesmarterchallenge.org). You can enter your specific vehicle data and figure out how much money you can save my taking six fuel-efficiency steps. They also provide other fuel-efficiency tips to help you save on gas costs.
@Tim: yes I did think that was a bit weird. Cruise control is really not a great way to save gas going uphill, is it? :-)