Editor's note: With this story, Mark Richardson becomes a regular contributor to Globe Drive.
Life's different when you slow down a bit. It's cheaper, for a start.
How much cheaper – and how much slower – is up to you. But I drove the roughly 500 kilometres between Toronto and Ottawa last week at just under the speed limit and halved my gas consumption.
It was part of an organized drive called EcoRun, in which 27 different vehicles joined a haphazard convoy to promote fuel-conscious driving. The point was to demonstrate just how fuel-efficient vehicles have become, and how much more miserly they can be if you only pause to think about it when driving.
The Toyota RAV4 Hybrid, for example, was all about saving fuel. Its official consumption on the highway is 7.6 litres/100 km, though it's better in the city, where it claims 6.9 litres/100 km. Most conventional cars are much worse on fuel in the city, but a car that runs partially on an electric motor turns that around: The electricity works at slower speeds, so will cut in more frequently in the city. It switches off the gas motor when it does so.
There's a little display on the gauges of the RAV4 Hybrid that tells you when you're charging the battery, driving economically, or draining the engine. It also shows you when the engine is off and the SUV is running only on the electric motor. The key to low fuel consumption is to keep that little electric motor light on as much as possible, because that means you're driving around using no gas at all.
I drove the RAV4 Hybrid a couple of months ago and my overall average at the end of a week was 8.3 litres/100 km. That's pretty good for a SUV – much better than the 11.4 lifetime average of my wife's 2009 V6-powered RAV4.
This week, though, I drove from Belleville to Kingston with one eye on the road and the other eye on the gauges. I feathered the throttle pulling away from lights and drove 10 below the limit on Highway 2, at 70 km/h. When speed limits lowered in towns, I slowed down too. I sped up on downhills and backed off on the uphills. I used the electric power in towns as much as possible.
When I got to Kingston, my average fuel consumption for the RAV4 Hybrid was 4.5 L/100 km. That's a huge difference, and all I really did was slow down.
It wasn't just the fancy hybrid technology that helped. I drove the bog-standard Chevrolet Cruze and saw an average of 4.2 litres/100 km (instead of its official highway rating of 5.6); the 2.5-litre Nissan Altima SL, which averaged 4.1 (instead of 6.0); and finished in a Lexus CT200h hybrid, which also averaged 4.1 (instead of 5.5).
This wasn't hypermiling, where drivers use every trick in the book to save fuel. Those fools draft behind trucks, drive at half the speed limit and even run with the right tires on the painted, slippery edge of the road to save friction. That's all dangerous … and dumb.
No – this was just relaxed, slower driving, coasting down hills and turning off the engine at traffic lights. I didn't use air-conditioning and kept the windows closed with the vents open, to make the vehicle as streamlined as possible, but the driver who earned second place said his air conditioning was cranked. The Altima included active grille shutters, which close off airflow under the hood when it's not needed to smooth the slipstream. The Cruze Eco model has these, but not the Cruze I drove.
Not every vehicle was practical. The hydrogen-powered Toyota Mirai, brought in from California specifically for this event, had nowhere to fuel up. The pure-electric cars needed two hours of fast charging after every hour of driving. The all-electric Nissan Leaf drained too quickly when its last-leg driver turned up the air conditioning, and it had to find an emergency charge at a bowling alley in Kemptville, Ont. The driver bowled a couple of frames while he waited but his best score was 122, so it clearly did no good.
The point is, the fuel consumption of today's vehicles is night and day compared to the previous generation. And your fuel consumption, too, can be night and day if you just slow down once in a while – mine improved 154 per cent over official government ratings. You might even get to bowl better than 122.
We've redesigned the Drive section – take a look