Tips to Improve Your Fuel Economy

Hey! Here are some things that could help you save some money. They are from research and experience. Please feel free to add more tips or suggestions as comments:

• Keep your car in good shape. Do the oil change when required; change the air filter whenever it is dirty, check fuel injectors...
• Travel light. Remove excess luggage in the car. It isn’t important for 4 people traveling in a car for an errand only 1 person can do (except you are rich enough to bear the burden of the extra fuel).
• Check your tyre pressure regularly and also know that worn tyres affect the fuel economy negatively. Also make sure the tyre in the car is the recommended tyre for the car.
• Accelerate slower and steadily. Rapid acceleration consumes a lot of fuel. Try to maintain a particular speed. Also brake gently. Anticipate the stop you want to make on time and start stopping way before it. This can be summarized as Gentle Driving.
• Combine many trips into one main one. Avoid short trips. Instead of driving to buy something down the road, take a walk instead. That saves your fuel and it's good exercise.
• Do not keep your car idle unnecessarily. CARS NOWADAYS DON’T NEED TO BE WARMED IN THE MORNINGS. They will warm up as you drive. Don’t rev the engine at idle. You are just wasting energy and ruining the engine.
• Do not remove the thermostat from your car or make the fans run permanently. The car optimizes its fuel economy when the engine is hot (that is when the temperature gauge is around the middle area of the scale). If your thermostat ever goes bad, replace it instead of removing it totally. We will talk about this in detail soon.
• Use the climate control efficiently.
• Do not over fill the fuel tank. You should stop adding fuel when the nozzle shuts off automatically the first time. Also make sure the fuel tank cap is closed tightly.

Please feel free to add more tips or suggestions as comments.

The Tyres

So let us not move to another important part of the car, The Tyres. Again, these are usually over looked. The first thing is to make sure the tyre pressures are always right, depending on what the particular car model says they should be. Over inflated tyres wear faster, they make the brakes less effective, and reduce traction among other things. Under inflated tyres reduce stability, worsen the fuel economy, and damage the rims among other things also. So it is important to get them right. The correct tyre pressure for each car model can be seen either on the owners manual or around the drivers door area in most cars and should be checked preferably in the mornings. Rotating of tyres should be done in accordance to the car specs. Generally, for front wheel drives, the tyres in the front are taken to the back, while the back ones are taken to the front. The new front tyres are then changed from the left to the right.

I have noticed that we tend to buy bigger tyres than what the car asks for. This isn’t too good because it throws your speedometer and odometer off slightly, affects your gear ratio and gear changing if you are driving an automatic and damages the transmission on a long run. However, they also tend to make the car more attractive and improve the fuel economy (not in all cases)
When buying new tyres, we usually see some codes written on it. Let me use P215/65R15 as an example. The P stands for passenger, the 215 stands for the width of the tyre in mm, the 65 is the ratio of the height to the width, R stands for Radial and 15 stands for the rim size. Tyres with bigger widths have better traction and grip on the road but aren’t fuel efficient because of the increased friction.

When buying new tyres, always check whether they are rotation specific or not. If they are rotation specific, then they need to be installed properly, with the arrow pointing in the right direction of rotation (i.e the forward direction). Failure to do so will cause rapid wear in the tyres. Also check if the tyre contains some coloured dots (commonly red and yellow). The dot should align with the valve of the tyre. By doing so, you are limiting the amount of wheel balancing you will have to do and so it reduces the vibrations of the car. The general life span of a tyre is six years, used or unused and the date of manufacture is usually written on the side wall of the tyre.

There are more to tyres and car maintenance in all, but these are the basic things to know. And remember, cars are man-made mechanical machines. You can do your best at observing all the rules, but still things can go bad or fail and they depreciate with age. This is peculiar to machines and even the human body. Our own part is to do the best we can at maintenance so that we can use the cars for as long as possible with as little stress as possible.

Get to Know your Engine

The most basic thing about engines is the oil change. This should be done at a regular interval and this depends on the kind of oil used. When using the natural engine oils (those are the common ones), it should be done either every 3000 miles or 5000 km or 3 months (whichever scenario comes first) and the oil filter also should be changed at every service.

It should become a practice to check the mileage of the car when the oil is changed. With this, you can calculate the respective miles or kilometer so as to know when next the oil change should be done. Most cars nowadays require low weight oils i.e. 30 and below. But unfortunately, the lowest you can find commercially available in Nigeria is weight 40. Therefore, I’ll recommend you use any engine oil that has SAE 40 or lower written on it, for example, 5W40 or 5W30 alike. The required oil for each car can be seen on the engine oil cover under the hood. (5W40 means that it acts as a 5 weight oil during winter, which we don’t have here and a 40 weight during summer).

Another important, yet overlooked maintenance practice by car owners and Nigerian mechanics is the change of air filters. The air filter is a very vital part and can cause a lot of headaches on the long run if overlooked. Its job from its name is to filter the air entering into the engine for the combustion process. So it prevents dust particles, stones and even insects getting in. The usual practice is to change it at every other service, i.e. either every 6 months or 6000 miles. But here in Nigeria, they usually go bad (dirty) before changed. If not changed, it could negatively affect the fuel economy of the car, cause the car to run poorly, damage the engine on the long run...
Warning **
**No matter what your mechanic tells you, NEVER WASH THE AIR FILTER AND RETURN TO THE ENGINE. This is because it is made up of paper and we all know what happens when paper and water mix.

The timing belt of the car should be changed every 100000 miles. This is to prevent it from breaking or cutting due to wear. If this happens when the car is running, it could damage your engine valves and might lead to replacing your engine head.

Spark plug and spark plug wires should also be changed about every 30000 miles (depending on what the manual of the car says). They can go a long way in determining the performance of the engine. It is very important to put the type of spark plugs and the spark plug gap recommended for the car. An example from my experience is a 2001 model camry which needed double platinum spark plugs and single platinum plugs were put in and it ran like crap. Another example is a Mercedes ML320 which didn’t have the right plug gap and didn’t idle well at all. It sounded like an old diesel generator.

All cars produced from 2000 above have reminders on that pop up telling us when to do the changes. Let us use Honda as an example here. Some appear as just ‘Maint Reqd’ or have some codes accompanying them with oil life, e.g. A1 service, A2, B4 and co. The A means replace the engine oil while the B means replace the oil and also inspect other stuff in the car e.g. the belts, tie rod ends. Brake lines etc. The 1 means rotate tyres (we will get to that), 2 means air filter, 3 means transmission fluid, 4 spark plugs and 5 engine coolant. It varies in each car model and this can be seen in the user manual.

We will talk about taking care of the transmission (gear) of a car in detail in a bit.