Best gas mileage in something used & affordable?

"Cathy F."...

What I find myself doing now is doing the PriusFoot thing where I lift up on the pedal and then lightly press it back down when I reach cruising speed on both the manual Jeep and the automatic Sienna... Tomes

The very, very first thing I did 'wrong' was when I drove my (first) new '98 automatic off the dealer's lot. There's a tad of an incline for a few feet adjacent to the road. You have to pull up as far/as near to the road as you can - for visibility, then check the oncoming traffic. Turned out there was a lot of traffic & there's no shoulder on that road, so I went to let the car roll back a few inches away from the edge of the lot/the road. Ha! No such thing happened any longer! I do miss that little perk of a manual.

Cathy

Why not? It tells the transmission to 'shift now' - I still do it. It's not really necessary on a computer controlled tranny, because it can tell the ECU to cut fuel momentarily. But older cars with an all hydraulic valve body it picks up on the cue when you feather the pedal, and the shifts are much smoother. Then you get back on the gas.

I've gotten to my destination, and found I left a half can of soda on the back bumper - it's still there. Drive smooth and easy, and the car will live a lot longer.

That brake pedal slam move is a lot more dramatic if you are driving passengers around for a living. Drive a stick car to work, then hop in a Van with an automatic to take people to their doctor's appointments. Did that for a few years in my misbegotten youth, and had to explain that 'pedal stab' more than once...

Switch back and forth a lot, and you can also get the opposite. You're rolling up to the red light at the bottom of the off-ramp, and the car bucks twice and the engine dies if you aren't real fast.

"Oh yeah, this one's stick. You have to push in the clutch..."

BT, DT, Have the tee-shirt.

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I've been driving the Supra a lot recently (AT) since the weather has been really nice, but I drove the Mazda (5-sp) over the weekend, and the other day I got in the Supra and went to push the clutch to start the engine...DUH!

But, I haven't done the foot-on-the-brake thing for a long time either...after almost getting rear ended when I was 21...

It probably works well by getting you into a higher gear sooner, eh?

I think that you have it it Ray. Lots to do with the driver. If you have a low power car and automatic, some drivers will tend to just put the gas to the floor at each stop light. While it was a long time back, I had a 81 Datsun and was in the dealer for new brakes. Talking to another that was there , it seems we had the same car except his was an auto. I was getting about 10 mpg more (35 for me and about 25 for him). He was complaining about how slow his car was to take off from a stoplight. My car had a 5 speed. The 5 th was more like an overdrive .

I have never tried it, but have always thought it might be cheeper to buy a car for around $ 1000 or so and drive it without doing anything but maybe changing the oil and putting in gas. When it dies on the road, pull the license tag off and leave it for the state to pull off. Then get another car for around the same price.

That is same speech I used to give customers who complained about fuel economy...

Don't think so in the Sienna, I usually do it at a line-out speed, but it might. Have not thought that thru.

In the Jeep it is a manual trans and all that does is make it pause a little bit... Tomes

I remember that those old Datsuns had 3 speed autos with wide ratios, no torque converter lock-up and no electronic control, unlike the autos of today.

An auto tranny is also ideal if you do lots of stop-start driving in town or the city which would otherwise give you cramps in the left leg if you use a manual.