Improving Your Automobile Gas Mileage

Try to minimize braking. In essence, it turns fuel into heat. The fuel used to accelerate your car become kinetic energy, and braking converts the kinetic energy into heat. When you know the traffic ahead of you is going to slow down or stop, back off so that you spend more time coasting and less time braking when you slow down.

Keep your speed above 30 and under 60 mph. DOE studies have shown that most cars get the best gas mileage between 30 and 60 (see chart). You know stop and go traffic reduces gas mileage, but so does driving 70-80 mph. My data shows about a 5 mpg drop on quarter tanks when I drove in heavy traffic with lots of idling; or when I drove at 70-80 mph. Cruise control at 50-60 mph gives the best gas mileage on my car.
Source: http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/driveHabits.shtml

Minimize driving on wet or snow covered roads. The water and snow on the pavement increases the rolling friction of the tires, a lot. My data shows about a 5 mpg drop when driving on snow-covered road.

Buy tires with low rolling friction advertised to save fuel. They can give you at least 1 mpg improvement, which can cut the effective cost of the new tires by about half.

Contrary to popular advice on this subject, I don’t think hard acceleration by itself reduces gas mileage. Fuel-injected engines are very efficient under heavy load at high RPM. Acceleration that results in heavy braking and high speed driving reduces gas mileage for those reasons.