Article in St Louis Post Dispatch

Here's an interesting article from yesterday's St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Does this sound like you?

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stor...C7?OpenDocument

Watch that read-out display
By Dan Callahan

Monday, Mar. 20 2006

Until recently, I was a typical red-blooded American driver who believed it was
my God-given right to go as fast as I could so long as I never got a speeding
ticket.

Then I bought a hybrid car, and everything changed.

Now, instead of watching for the brake lights of cars ahead that tell me a cop
is around or calculating how much time I'm saving by staying above 70 nearly
the whole way home, I have a new preoccupation: keeping my gas mileage above 50
miles per gallon.

And, as a result, for the first time in my driving life, I can say with pride:
I'm driving the speed limit.

Yes. I've become one of those people. You know, the ones who drive you crazy
(literally) in the right lane, who apparently don't have any "Seinfeld" reruns
to rush home to or families waiting to be argued with.

I've discovered a community of fellow drivers who don't appear to be in a rush
to get anywhere. (Either that or they don't know their cars are actually
capable of higher speeds.) Some of them even stay below the speed limit,
although I suspect you already knew this.

I've had time to study them as I pass them veerry slooowly: It seems I've
joined a community of very old, short people wearing thick glasses.

My hybrid car encourages and rewards this kind of driving via the space-age
dashboard display that -- among many other strange and wonderful things --
constantly updates your gas mileage. As if it were a video-game score, the
read-out rewards behaviors I never knew I was capable of: keeping acceleration
to a minimum, maintaining an even, albeit slow, speed and avoiding hills.

Basically, I'm driving like my grandmother.

The part I really like is something I started noticing when the weather began
changing: If it's warmer outside than 50 degrees or so, my engine shuts itself
down when I come to a complete stop.

I used to hate stopping for any reason. Now, I get a strange sense of
satisfaction sitting at a red light and admiring the high numbers on my mileage
read-out. I've even started avoiding right turns on red so I can sit in
contented silence at the light.

These days, when drivers whiz by me on the freeway, I find myself saying out
loud: "Ha! I wonder what kind of gas mileage you're getting!" If I could come
up with a hand gesture to communicate this thought, I'd make it.

I was that driver once, motoring around blissfully ignorant until I filled up
my tank, did the mental math and tried to fool myself by rounding up as much as
possible.

Not that I'm getting obsessive about this, but when my wife borrowed the car
recently, she must have driven it like a Maserati, for crying out loud, because
the read-out had slipped to 46 mpg. I suppressed my fury and set about pumping
that number back up, seeking out long hills to glide down and motorists to
annoy with my zen-like driving habits.

I'm back up above 50, you'll be glad to know, and I'm working on a route
that'll let me coast the entire way to work in the morning. Feel free to pass
me if you're on Highway 40 heading west. I'll be the one with the blissed-out
look on my face who knows his car is better than yours.

Dan Callahan of Clayton grew up in Milwaukee and recently moved to St. Louis
from Minneapolis. He finds St. Louis too hilly for his tastes.