More Than Living

Green driving adviceEco-​​drivingFuel-​​saving top tips

Wasn’t so long ago that ‘green driv­ing’ meant poot­ling around a golf course on an elec­tric cart.

Now of course every­one knows it means driv­ing your car in a fuel-​​efficient way. It’s even become part of our driv­ing test in the UK.

Let’s be clear: it’s not as green as not driv­ing at all. But if you’ve got to get in the car – or if you just want to save money on petrol – green driv­ing is the way forward.

There’s a lot of advice out there, so we thought we’d do the nav­ig­a­tion for you and pick out what you *really* need to know to save fuel.

Get quick on the gears
Change up as early as you can, gen­er­ally between 2,000 and 2,500 RPM.

Steady now
The most fuel-​​efficient speed to drive depends on the vehicle, but recent research by What Car? has sug­ges­ted that it is the lowest speed at which you can com­fort­ably travel in highest gear – which could be as low as 20 to 40mph. So a valid reason for a bit of ‘Sunday driving’.

But if you haven’t got the time to be quite so laid back, at least keep­ing at an even tick should save fuel, as will accel­er­at­ing and decel­er­at­ing gently where you can.

Don’t be an idler
If you’re likely to be sta­tion­ary for more than a minute or two, switch off the engine. Burn­ing petrol when you’re not even moving is so last century.

Slim down
We’re talk­ing about the car here. Although, think­ing about it, if you’re car­ry­ing a few extra pounds it wouldn’t hurt your fuel con­sump­tion to shed those too.

If you don’t use your roof-​​rack, it’s a real drag – so get rid of it. Car­ry­ing around gub­bins (recyc­ling, boxes to go to the char­ity shop, massively heavy dumbells, etc) also adds to the load, so give your boot (and, if you’re really grubby, foot­wells) a clearout.

How much fuel can green driv­ing save?

Tricky to put a figure on this, but the Driv­ing Stand­ards Agency think 8.5% on aver­age, while others reckon a saving of 15% is easy to achieve.

Bigger sav­ings are cer­tainly pos­sible, if you take it to extremes (though you do so at sig­ni­fic­ant risk of road rage on the UK’s busy streets).

Going fur­ther

There’s more detailed advice on green driv­ing at Eco​drive​.org and on MORE TH>N’s Green Driv­ing Tips pages. If that’s not enough to fuel the new green you, try EcoModder.com’s whop­ping list of eco­driv­ing tips.

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More on green driving

108 (and count­ing) Hyper­mil­ing Tips

From the Eco­Mod­dder forum

Eco​-drive​.org

Full of sci­en­cey green driv­ing wisdom

Effi­cient driving

Advice from the good people at the Energy Saving Trust

Green driv­ing tips

With nice pic­tures, on the main MORE TH>N site

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Header image (green cars) by Flickr user

doug88888, rabbit image by

absolutwade

Art­icle updated 24.10.08

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2008-​​07-​​02 01:54:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

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