my most recent trip (and a highway hypermiling trick)

Hi all,

I recently went to Sheboygan, WI from Madison, WI, and I thought I'd share my experiences. I take US-151 (65 MPH, 2 lanes in each direction) to Fond du Lac and then WI-23 (55 MPH, mostly 1 lane in each direction) to Sheboygan, so it's a nice, rolling-hill-filled drive of a little more than 2 hours.

I got 62 MPG going there and 61 coming back (previous bests were 66.5 and 58, during my early Prius days I got 50 and 45). There were two things I did to bump up my economy.

1. I drove through Fond du Lac instead of taking the highway bypass. I got to Pulse-and-Glide more, and it easily boosted MPG by at least 1.5 overall.

2. I averaged about 57 MPH on 151 (yep, people were passing me quite a bit), but I decided to try a little something that actually worked, a highway version of pulse-and-glide. Basically, I would ramp my car up to a little over 60 (keep the MPG at around 25-30 for the acceleration), and lightly keep my foot on the gas so that the display read ~70 MPG until the car would decelerate to just above 50 MPH. If you have favorable terrain, you can easily "glide" 10 seconds for every 1 second of pulse. I averaged ~61 MPG for the entire stretch of 151. It took a little longer to get there, but I gave myself plenty of time and it was well worth it.

If anyone else has highway hypermiling tips, please share them.

PDK