The myths about Achieving Better Gas Mileage that Hamstring You

Americans really care about the price of their fuel. When the price of gas begins to creep close to four dollars a gallon, the news outlets just can't stop talking about it. And yet, you wouldn't, to look at the way, Americans make use of their gas, think that they cared all that much to understand how gas mileage works and how you squeeze as much out of it as possible.

America is making the transition towards government-mandated 50 mpg automobile technology. If every car in America could boast of those kinds of numbers, we would save ourselves as much oil as we have in the Gulf of Mexico. That's how big a deal high gas mileage is. Let's look at a few areas of misunderstanding that unfortunately hold Americans back from achieving the kind of gas mileage they could have.

Let's start with an all-time favorite - letting the engine idle at a stop signal instead of turning it off. Some people will actually leave their engine running for 15 min. rather than turn it off because they believe that turning it off and starting it again will use up more gas. Unless you're stuck in a traffic jam that isn't about to start moving again, unless you need the air conditioner working, turning off the engine would make for a very smart move. An idling engine works at nearly half the speed it would if it were drive the car at a steady speed. Idling uses up a half gallon of fuel every hour. There is no way that stopping and starting an engine can use more than that.

People believe that as a car grows older, that its fuel economy becomes worse and worse. Once they believe this, they set themselves up to expect less of their car. And this makes them grow careless with their driving habits. A car that's maintained properly will easily maintain like-new gas mileage. And for this, you don't need to constantly keep replacing your air filter or warm your engine up every morning. A clean air filter does nothing for you in a modern car with fuel injection.

People believe that using premium fuel can improve your gas mileage. They also believe that on top of using premium fuel, that there are certain miracle additives on the market that can give them dramatically improved efficiency. Both assumptions are wrong. Using fuel that's better specified than what your car manual asks for is just money down the drain. And the same goes for additives. Consumer Reports and the FTC have completely checked every popular additive out there and determined that they do absolutely nothing for your fuel efficiency. In some cases, they do help your car engine run smoother. But that's about it.

A Crash Test can only be Complete once they do This

When you see advertisements by companies like Saab or Volvo that focus on how safe their cars are, they often show you elaborate videos of their crash test methods - to win your confidence. And those videos inevitably show you how they test those cars with crash test dummies. Is that how it is really done? If you have always suspected that there has to be more to these crash tests than merely the use of dummies, you could be onto something.

The thing is, as advanced as the understanding of the safety departments of the auto companies is of how they must interpret the things that happened to crash test dummies, their understanding isn't perfect. They can never know how exactly the safety features on their cars can translate into real world results until they use actual humans strapped to those seats. Every car company has to do this; the question is, how.

The answer is that they use cadavers. When generous-minded people leave their body to science, many of those bodies end up strapped to car seats in a crash test. And it's been this way for close to 80 years now. They use cadavers to test the safety of air bags, the safety of a steering column design, the safety of a laminated windshield and everything else. How about the 2011 Ford Explorer that has inflatable rear seatbelts? Ford keeps advertising this safety feature these days; it's a design that would not have been possible if it were not for how they tested with human cadavers. So what do the big car companies actually do? Do they order dead bodies, and then hand them over to their engineers? Not exactly. Those engineers really don't have the expertise needed to handle cadaver crash tests properly. Instead, they farm this work out to the universities that do have the required expertise.

Whatever test results come out of universities, all car manufacturers tap into them. For instance, with the inflatable seatbelts idea that Ford had, they really had no idea how it would work in real life to have seatbelts that could inflate in a flash. What would happen for instance, if there was a child with those seatbelts on? They needed to know exactly what it would do to the internal organs of a human to have seatbelts explode into a balloon all of a sudden. They had a cadaver crash test test done for them, and the results were encouraging enough that the device was offered on an actual car this year.

If you think about it, this isn't just some commercial thing that those cadavers are used for. Experts estimate that the advances made in the vehicle crash safety through testing with cadavers has saved about 10,000 lives so far. What could be better science?

What would you do for Affordable Auto Insurance -

for Instance, would you get Married for It?

If you've been looking at your car insurance quotes and swearing to yourself that you have no idea how these people get their figures, here's a clue - mostly, they get their figures working out what kind of driving history you have. When it comes to auto insurance, there's no part of your life or your personal driving history that they consider to be too personal. They look at every ticket, citation, fender bender, how much you drive every year, what kind of car you drive, where you live, anything they can get their hands on. To them, affordable auto insurance is nothing about being fair to you; it's everything about finding out if you drive a staid family car that you're not likely to drive fast; it's about their taking reassurance from how little you drive every year and then telling themselves that the less you are on the road, the smaller the risk you are; it's about being someone who is solidly dependable - you don't want any moving violations or accidents that tell them that you could be a risky bet. If you've had your license for only a year, they tell themselves that they don't know enough about you to be able to judge the kind of driver you are; it's like being 20 years old and having a thin dossier for the credit score people to able to judge you by.

One of first things you can do for affordable auto insurance is to make sure you have the longest possible driving history. A long driving history doesn't necessarily mean that you need to have been driving for long. It just means you need to get your license at the stroke of 12 midnight the day you turn 16. The longer you have a license, the deeper the auto insurance people can look into your past to see you have any violations on your record. If you don't drive at all despite the fact that you possess a license, that gives you a very long and clean driving record. That's a good thing.

There are certain things about you that you just can't control and that will go and affect the kind of rates you get quoted. For instance, if you are male, that makes you a high risk group. Males, whether they're teenaged boys or 30-year-old men, happen to get themselves into more trouble than girls or women do. You just can't do anything about this assumption that insurance companies have.

You don't have to do anything drastic with your life to save $100 or so off the $800 you spend on auto insurance every year (that's what the average American spends). But you do need to know that if you happen to get married, you're supposed to have your best action-packed years behind you and have mellowed. They'll lower your insurance rates. When you go house hunting, you probably don't get to see the charts the auto insurance companies have for your zip code. They look to see how many cars get stolen in your area, how many car-related accidents there are, how much it costs to get a procedure done at a local hospital, and how much repairing the car costs. Depending on how your particular area fares, you get better or worse rates. Do you need to change your zip code for this? That's entirely up to you. You get to save about $100 per year, moving to the best possible area.