Fuel sensitive driving

[etienne]

Hello,
I just wrote an article about fuel sensitive driving for the Klima Pact campain in Luxembourg. Here is an English translation. If anybody has any comment (also regarding gramatics, I'm always happy to learn), they are welcome.  It is to be published in the county paper, so I tried to avoid direct confrontation regarding motor size and car weight.
If you would want to publish it in your area, please ask me. I'm quite open on the subject, but I'd like to be the first publisher in the Luxembourgish area, if it's accepted, it will be published in January of February.
Regards,
Etienne

[Neven]

Nice overview, Etienne.

I try to drive 80-90 km/h on the motorway because the EV I bought a couple of weeks ago, doesn't have enough range to bring me to the nearest city and back, so every kWh I can save by driving slowly is worth it (and it only takes 5-10 minutes longer to drive).

When I was driving through Germany and the Netherlands, after having bought the car, there were plenty of trucks driving around 85 km/h, which was perfect for me to sneak in behind (for constant speed and perhaps some Windschatten). But Austrians don't drive under 95-100 km/h, not even the trucks. And so everyone is overtaking me, which worries me a bit, because it could increase the risk of an accident.

It happens even on the Bundesstrasse, where overtaking is more dangerous, where it feels like I constantly have a big Audi or Mercedes just a few metres behind me. And it doesn't matter whether it's foggy or raining, or even snowing. Very annoying.

I underestimated this factor.

[Tor Bejnar]

I made suggestions to Etienne via PM a couple hours ago. (I write this just in case someone interprets no obvious responses to mean 'no one cares'.) 

I will state that I'm not so 'American' as to translate "liters" ("That's a quart, right?") or convert them to American gallons ("Is there any other kind?"), but I may have written something 'wrong'. (I know about "lorries", "boots", "windscreens" and "billions" [none of which are in the article], but I'm sure there are terms where English and American differ, with me being oblivious of the fact.)

[TerryM]

Etienne

I've assumed that what I read was a machine translation and that spelling would be corrected prior to publication, but what is a "car refrigeration" system referring to if not the automotive A/C?


Neven
I'm not familiar with European driving habits or laws, but "tailgating", or following closely behind another vehicle is frowned on and illegal throughout N. America.


Stay Safe
Terry

[Neven]

It's illegal here too, which is why I'm always surprised to see the generally conformist and rule-abiding Austrians engage in it so much.

[magnamentis]

Nice overview, Etienne.
 But Austrians don't drive under 95-100 km/h, not even the trucks. And so everyone is overtaking me, which worries me a bit, because it could increase the risk of an accident.

try it out over a period and on comparable days:

if you drive with 96km/h behind a truck in it's slipstream you will consume less or about the same amount of energy like driving at 80-85km/h in the open. believe me i tested that myself many times on my ways from prague to zurich and vice versa.

my guess would be that it' could even be slightly less, depends a bit on the distane to the truck or transporter while trucks are really huge and provide a long and steady slipstream.

one other thing that you will find out is that there is a "best" distance when it comes to turbulences, not that they would act up as a safety issue but they're unpleasant over a long distance.

try it out, it works and you are even more efficiently driving, considering that time too is not without value.

[etienne]

Well, it will be published in french, so there is no issue regarding spelling, but my spell checker didn't find any issue in my text. I'm using NeoOffice (Mac version of OpenOffice) and there is no gramatical checker (at least in my version). If somebody has improvement suggestions, please make a personal message. A good English version can be interesting if somebody would want to publish it in that language.

I wrote "car refrigerator" because what I wanted to talk about matched with the images google provides when searching these words. It is a box that allows you to transport cooled products (milk...) for a longer time and works with 12V DC. It is quite common here in Luxembourg.

I used liters and km because it is written for Luxembourg. Units converters are easy to find on Internet. I didn't have time to write an international version. My understanding is that the US prefer miles per gallon. Here we talk about liters per 100 km.

-------
Addedum : I just checked, car fridge provides the same images on google than car refrigerator. Google translate uses in french : réfrigérateur for refrigerator, and frigo for fridge. Both are similar in both languages.

[etienne]

You will find bellow a new version of the document with many improvements (gramatics and contents) suggested by Tor Bejnar as well as the french version. I really want to thank Tor Bejnar for his help.

I made some changes after his lasts comments, so if there still are some mistakes, it's my fault.

If somebody would want to make an US version, it's quite easy to transform the liters per 100 km into miles per gallons. The sentense to change would be :

Electric vehicle drive typically a little bit more than 100 miles with the 33,4 kWh that a gallon contains. This is about 3 times more than a similar ICE motorized car, which is normal since ICE only have 1/3 efficiency.

Don't know about tyre efficiency in the US.

While improving the document, I found a page of the European Union regarding Energy Efficiency. I thought that the link might interest some people on this forum :
https://ec.europa.eu/energy/en/topics/energy-efficiency/energy-efficient-products