Kim is so in love with the science of meteorology that her number one hobby is chasing tornadoes. On her most exciting excursion into tornado alley, she spotted twelve of the dangerous storms. The story she broadcast about that trip helped earn her an Emmy Award nomination as best weathercaster in New England.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
HYPER MILEAGE -- THE EARLY SHOW DID IT, NOW I'LL GIVE IT A TRY!
Did you happen to catch the Early Show on CBS this week. My ears pricked up when they did a segment on "hyper mileage". This is the art of maximizing the gas mileage out of your car. The car they used in their story happened to not only be the exact car I have, a Toyota Prius, but the same silver color (paying even MORE attention now...) Here is a link to the Early Show's story (click here.) You can watch the Early Show Video by clicking here.
In the story, they had a reporter and an experienced "hyper miler" drive two separate Prius cars from Chicago to New York City. The reporter drove like a normal reporter would, kind of in a hurry. The hyper miler took his time and made the 700 mile trip ON ONE TANK OF GAS! I know well that my tank holds about 10 gallons, so I did the math and realized he was averaging 70 miles per gallon -- THAT'S INSANE -- THAT IS AWESOME!
Lately, I have been trying to drive more slowly (insert many smart reasons why to do this HERE) especially because of the high price of gas. So, I must say, that before I started today's little experiment (part one in the video below), my average miles per gallon was already on the high side (52 mpg -- that is HIGH for me.) But I wanted to see if I, too, could be a 70 MPGer! Have a LQQK!
The next video is the result of my trip. I took a slight detour on my way to Ben's, and my trip was 25 miles. I drove both in DC and on the highway ( Rt. 395 ), so I had a mix of city and highway traffic. Have a look at my results below and press play:
I ended up improving my mpg by about 4 mpg (over 25 miles.) Now, this number probably would have been better had I RESET my miles-per-gallon calculator on the dashboard when I began my trip to Springfield. Because I didn't do that, my new average mpg was being weighted down by my original mpg average of about 52 mpg going into this experiment (that was acquired over 50 miles.) Ah, well, live and learn. All I know is that if everyone just slowed down, allowed more stopping distance between themselves and didn't "jack rabbit" it out of the stop lights, we'd probably ALL save a lot on gas (not to mention getting rid of excess stuff we keep in the car that we don't need to keep in the car and keep our tire pressure at the proper setting.) Okay, that's my 2 cents on the topic. WHAT DO YOU THINK?
