This morning I was reading the paper and at the bottom of the front page was an ad for ExxonMobil, with the heading “fuel for thought” and a clever picture of a circle that was a tire, but the top portion of the circle was what looked like a gas gauge on “full” but it read “1 Billion” and the lead copy on the ad read “How can we save up to a billion gallons of gasoline?” and points out that proper tire inflation is a way to save a lot of money on gas. I will add that I tried to find the ad on the ExxonMobil site and the New York Times site, and I couldn’t find it anywhere (if any of you reading this can find it, I will update the post and thank you in the post), otherwise there would be an image of the ad itself.
Anyway, the simple observation here is that this is a classic “how” trap where we think about “how” to save money on gas, we think about
1) driving less
2) buying cheaper gas, or
3) buying a more fuel efficient vehicle
Tire inflation is just something most of us never think about, and we don’t think about how much it really impacts our driving. It is hard to measure how much you save with properly inflated tires, but it makes a huge difference and I will give you two examples of why I know this.
Many years ago I was on a business trip in Montreal and it was forty degrees below zero, not including the wind chill which took it under 80, and there was a lot of snow on the ground, but my cab driver didn’t have chains on his tires. I asked him about it and he said that all you have to do in those specific conditions is let some air out of your tires and that provides enough grip on the road (which is resistance – which burns more gas) to not need tires. I thought that was pretty interesting. I didn’t think of the fuel consumption point until today when I read this ad, but it makes sense.
The other example is something that I learned over 20 years ago when I was doing a lot of biking on the streets of Seattle (after co9llege I was saving money for grad school). I had a mountain bike, my trusty Fuji Cadenza (which I still ride) and I used to ride it everywhere. When I bought it, with it’s big knobby tires, the bike shop owner pointed out that bikes have to be able to support very large people, and they are tested to support a 300 pound person, and at the time I weighed 150 pounds, he told me I could inflate the tires to double the recommended pressure which was about 120 PSI. You should try it. It was like walking in soft sand compared to walking on a sidewalk. I can go so much faster than any other mountain biker, still, because my tires have so much less resistance. It is really amazing.
So that’s why I am not surprised that we can save a billion gallons of gasoline (and not just ExxonMobil gasoline . . .) with proper tire inflation. If we want to get really serious about it, we should suggest that people in drier cities drive with smooth tires in the Summer, because all of those ridges in tires are for rain and they add a lot of resistance.
-Ric
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