Was thinking about this today and started playing with it.

Generally, when hypermiling, I'm trying to feather the throttle as lightly as possible to use as little gas as possible. This has always worked pretty well for me, giving me very nearly 50 mpg doing "light-footed" pulse and glide from about 40-55 mph.

What I started thinking about was that internal combustion engines are actually more efficient under higher loads than that. So, I started playing with doing nearly full-throttle (trying to avoid full-throttle because most cars go open-loop and rich at full-throttle) acceleration in top gear for the "pulse" portion of my pulse & glide instead of the "baby the throttle and barely accelerate" method that I've been using. The theory here is that I'm opening the throttle enough to let the engine suck in as much air as it wants and letting the EFI supply whatever fuel is required for that. The result should be more torque from each bit of fuel used. Used properly, this technique "should" yield better economy.

I'm pretty sure this is how Jeff managed to get 41 mpg out of his Spec V Sentra. He's got the torque to crawl out of just about any hole, so he'd coast down to 35-40 mph in 6th, then floor it and accelerate up to 70... then coast back down again. (of course, he was killing the engine and coasting in neutral, too... so his coasts were longer than my DFCO coasts)

Anyway, using this method as I was able to today (driving around between Safety Harbor and Palm Harbor) I managed to pull an average of 45.6 mpg. So, if it's not helping, it's certainly isn't HURTING anything.

Anyone else see the merit in this idea? I can't say that I really came up with the idea myself, I seem to remember reading it somewhere a while back.

So, I'm accelerating gently through first and second, then carrying 2nd or 3rd up to about 30-35, then dumping it to 5th and giving it a heavy throttle to accelerate up to... maybe 10 mph over whatever the speed limit is, then lift and go into DFCO and coast down either to a couple mph below the speed limit (or slower if nobody is behind me), or prep to start decelerating for the next light, whichever is appropriate.

I still find it stunning how many people freakin' RACE to an obviously red light at a major intersection. You can SEE the light is red from 1/4 mile away and the traffic is so backed up there that you KNOW you're going to have to stop even if the light turns green... still, they stay in the throttle going 20 mph over the speed limit and drop anchor at the last second. People just don't get it. I managed to pass several of those people as they were stopped at some of those lights today without ever even slowing below 2nd gear speed myself by simply taking stock of the situation and choosing the correct lane. Pretty funny, really.

Rambling again. Yep, that's me.