LPT. To save money on fuel and maintenance on your vehicle practice these tips and you’ll save $1000s of dollars over the life of your vehicle:

Submitted by woodbarber t3_11ay7cp in LifeProTips

  1. Avoid jackrabbit starts and stops. Accelerate slowly and evenly when starting. If you see a traffic light half a block away turn yellow, take your foot off the accelerator and coast to the stop.

  2. When going down hill and you want to slow down, gear down. This can be done on automatic transmissions as well as manual. Use the compression of the engine to help slow you down. Start braking well before the stop, this will greatly extend the life of your brake pads, callipers and rotors.

  3. Check your tire pressure regularly. Uneven or low pressure in your tires will make your engine work much harder to maintain constant speed.

  4. Do regular maintenance. Change your oil and filters regularly. Don’t skip on recommended maintenance cycles (steering, belts, linkage etc). It’s much cheaper to do preventive maintenance as opposed to breakdown maintenance.

  5. Carry breakdown insurance such as AAA (CAA here in Canada). A Tow charge over a long distance will cost much more then the a few years of Annual membership fees.

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Comments

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Zoltan_Kakler t1_j9v4abl wrote

/#2 is not a great suggestion. Brake pads and rotors are cheap and pretty easy to replace. Transmissions are the opposite, expensive and difficult to replace. So use those brakes for what they're intended for.

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Awanderinglolplayer t1_j9usvvt wrote

Do jackrabbit starts actually do anything bad to the car?

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Sapphire580 t1_j9wxrsf wrote

Anytime you’re not being smooth with the vehicle you’re adding additional wear on everything in that system. Hard acceleration puts extra force on the clutch/torque converter, put extra pressure on the gears of the transmission, puts extra strain on the driveshaft puts extra strain on the U-joints of the driveshaft, or the CV-joints of a drive axle, and extra strain on the contact patch of the tires, even if you’re not accelerating hard enough to spin the tires you may still be going hard enough to peel a micro layer of rubber off.

Similar with hard braking, more wear on the brake pads, excess heat in the pads and discs, plus extra wear of that outer layer of the tire tread.

Hard cornering can put additional strain and friction on suspension components, and steering components, ball joints, bushings etc, plus there’s that added strain on the tires to get you around that hard corner. In a NASCAR race the cars are going near 200mph around the track, they generally aren’t skidding tires or spinning tires, but with just the force of the hard cornering they peel off these little hard rubber bits from the tires so much so that partway through the race there is a clean and dirty part of the track that does or doesn’t have these little rubber marbles rolling around.

Remember, the more g-force you feel in any direction the more wear you’re putting on a specific part of your car. Smooth is key

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keepthetips t1_j9uqoy5 wrote

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