There's a geeky new craze hitting the highways, and it's called hypermiling. While others race to consume their rightful share of the world's remaining oil—because any gas not used in an SUV on its way to someplace important is just a waste—there are a bunch of guys (mostly) on the roads wearing pocket protectors and accelerating slowly, allowing a cushion of space to grow between themselves and the car in front of them, and chuckling ruefully at the unenlightened rubes in the other lanes who continue to convert their precious gasoline kilocalories into heat via the brakes, while the nempimaniacs themselves coast along smoothly on their own inertia, arriving at jams just as they magically dissolve.
I've long been a believer in the "don't stop" school of driving, trying to defuse highway volume congestion by maintaining a painfully slow crawl instead of closing every forward gap, then jerking to a stop. And when I recently took up my new driving commute, I did a little searching online and found some resources about conserving gas while behind the wheel.
Naturally, I donned my lab coat and goggles, got into the beater, and put some of these techniques into practice. And I've realized that hypermiling has been around for decades under another name: "Driving slowly."
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I've long been a believer in the "don't stop" school of driving, trying to defuse highway volume congestion by maintaining a painfully slow crawl instead of closing every forward gap, then jerking to a stop. And when I recently took up my new driving commute, I did a little searching online and found some resources about conserving gas while behind the wheel.
Naturally, I donned my lab coat and goggles, got into the beater, and put some of these techniques into practice. And I've realized that hypermiling has been around for decades under another name: "Driving slowly."
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