Here’s how you should manage your car’s fuel efficiently

Vehicle fuel efficiency has become really important now as the petroleum prices stay high almost throughout the year. Stop being concerned about the increasing prices of petroleum, rather, drive your car in a fuel effective manner. To make sure you use every drop of your fuel, you surely need to take on some measures. One cannot just rely on the oil prices going cheaper so it’s better you go on for methods which costs you less on fuel consumption.

If you need to understand how to make your car tuned properly on petrol after you have ditched CNG as primary fuel, then Bilal Ahmad has written a pretty good piece on how to do that. Three steps to save petrol in a CNG fitted car.

Once you have your car tuned properly on petrol, here’s what you can do or avoid doing to be a more fuel efficient driver:

Avoid heavy breaking and make sure you throttle less. This way you’re saving on both the fuel consumption and also the wear and tear. Researches have proved that you can increase your fuel efficiency by 30% if you do this.

You’re not on a quarter mile track for a race so you don’t need to rush up. Keep your nerves calm and make sure you don’t stretch a gear for long. It’s better to drive on a higher gear as driving fast at a lower gear can consume up to 45% of extra fuel.

Get your tire pressure checked at least once in two weeks. Tires that are under inflated are burning on more fuel. You’re not going for a drifting competition that you need great grips, so pressure up your tires adequately.

Keep the engine warm as it’ll give you better mileage, to effectively keep the engine warm you really need to drive it, not rev it. Make sure you don’t do rev your car before you switch off the engine because it washes off the oil from the walls of the tank and also makes them dry. This is really bad for the next start of the engine.

Read the owner’s manual and change the air filters at least the number of times it’s written in it.

Don’t carry extra load on your car. Before leaving, plan your journey and decide on what things are necessary and what are not. Remove roof racks if they’re not needed because they create wind drag making the car to struggle against the wind. The lighter the load you have on your car the better the fuel consumption will be. Researches show that fuel efficiency increases by 1%-2% if the load on the car is minimum.

Use appropriate level of engine oil, again read the owner’s manual. It’s clearly stated there that whether you need thick oil for the engine or not.

Avoid resting your left foot on the brake pad. Even the slightest pressure on the brake pad decreases the car motion which you don’t realize but it costs you more on the fuel.

Inspection of wheel alignment, wheel balancing, suspension and shocks should be done on frequent basis.

Last but not the least; avoid driving on rough and bumpy roads. You can apply your physics here which you thought will never come in use again in your life, every time the car goes up and down, the pressure against the wind decreases robbing up to 30% of your fuel.

These are some of the methods which I think are important. You surely must have some different techniques for saving on your fuel. Share your techniques too so we can be more fuel efficient and worry less on the prices of petrol increasing rapidly in our country.