Five Tips For Raising Your Car’s Fuel Economy
The price of gas, still low by last year’s standards, has slowly started to tick back up. With summer fast approaching, now is a good time to start implementing methods for getting better mileage. Here are five which are relatively easy to do.
1. Properly inflate your tires
Statistically, 23% of cars have at least one tire that’s under-inflated by 20% or more. According to the Department of Energy, cars with under-inflated tires lose 1% of their fuel efficiency for every 3 PSI beneath their recommended tire pressure. That means one out of every four cars is wasting 3% of the gas put into it. All total, that little bit of waste accounted for 1.2 billion gallons of gas in 2005.
2. Regularly Change Your Oil and Filters
Clean oil and fresh filters are important in making your car run more smoothly. Regularly maintaining both your oil and filters helps to keep your car running more efficiently by preventing buildup. Buildup, as we all know, forces your car to work harder to achieve the same results, and harder work means more gas used. Read the rest of this entry »
A Horsepower Calculator For Raising Your Car’s Top Speed
Horsepower calculators can help you figure out how much horsepower to reach a certain top speed figure with your car. However, before we get into calculating the amount of horsepower you need to reach a certain top speed goal, let us first look into some of the factors affecting your car or vehicle’s top speed.
In general, top speed is physically a balance point between all of the forces acting on your car. When the total sum of the forces propelling the car forward, are exactly equal to the total sum of the forces holding it back, the car can no longer increase its velocity and reaches a steady state top speed.
In doing so, we have broken down the top speed equation into two primary factors which are:
Force: Represented in horsepower
Resistance: Represented in drag
Breaking it down even further:
The factors affecting how much force your car has behind it are related to:
* The total amount of raw horsepower you have to work with
* The final drive gearing of your vehicle which combines your transmission gear ratio, your differential final drive ratio, and your wheel and tire package diameter Read the rest of this entry »