Eco Driving: Save 20-40% Fuel With PRO Hypermiling Tips & Myths Busted.

Looking to save fuel & improve your driving efficiency & fuel economy? Which ECO driving tips work & which are just myths?

This video breaks down some of the best eco-driving tips that could help you reduce fuel consumption by 20-40%! Fuel-saving isn’t about simply driving slower—it’s about understanding how your driving style affects fuel economy, particularly how you use the throttle and brake pedals.

Think of it this way: the heavier your foot on the accelerator, the worse your fuel economy gets. It’s not about the RPM; it’s about throttle position.

Sure, we’ve all heard that 50 mph is the “magic speed” for the best fuel economy, but the truth is that every car has its own sweet spot. In some cases, cruising at 70 mph might burn 20% more fuel than driving at 50 mph on the same route.

That’s why it’s important to find that balance for your car—an RPM range that optimizes power and efficiency. For most vehicles, this sweet spot sits around 2,000 to 2,500 RPM, but it varies between engine types.

Eco-driving isn’t about dragging your car at low speeds and holding up traffic either. You still need to keep things flowing. Sensible acceleration and gear selection are key to maximizing fuel savings. Some drivers suggest treating one-third throttle like full throttle to encourage more gradual acceleration, but that varies depending on your engine and driving conditions.

Have you ever heard of “BSFC” (Brake Specific Fuel Consumption)? It’s basically a measure of how efficiently your engine uses fuel to generate power. For example, using 50% throttle can make your car accelerate twice as fast but only use 1.9 times more fuel—helping you reach speed more efficiently.

What about those hills? Let your car pick up speed going downhill and ease off the throttle uphill. It’s better than trying to maintain a constant speed and battling gravity.

Cruise control can be your enemy here—sometimes, it forces the engine to work harder when you could be driving smarter.

Ever tried the "pulse and glide" method? Some drivers swear by it—accelerate, then coast, then repeat. But does it work? In most cases, constant speed is more efficient. Also, coasting in neutral is illegal in many places and can even be dangerous.

When coasting in gear, your engine uses zero fuel, but in neutral, it still consumes fuel to keep running.

Tailgating to reduce wind drag might save you a few MPGs, but it’s dangerous and not worth the risk. You won’t see any measurable improvement in fuel economy to justify the potential consequences.

Keep your car well-maintained. Proper tire pressure alone can save you 4-5 MPG. Use high-quality synthetic oils, especially in modern engines, and keep an eye on your injectors, intake, and fuel quality to avoid losing efficiency.

Eco-driving isn’t just for commuters. Even if you have a turbocharged or high-performance car, you can still practice fuel-saving techniques without sacrificing performance.

Avoid short trips on a cold engine, and keep your vehicle moving smoothly to reduce the energy required to get going from a stop.

Half-tank driving? Sure, it lightens your load, but you’ll also need to refuel more often, which can negate any savings. Think about the balance.

So, do you lift off the accelerator slightly when cruising to encourage gear changes and fuel savings? Some drivers claim better fuel efficiency after a brief throttle lift, depending on the engine and ECU.

Finally, using eco modes in cars can help, but nothing beats developing solid fuel-saving driving habits yourself. Being a skillful driver—anticipating the road ahead and driving with efficiency in mind—often results in better fuel economy than relying solely on eco-driving aids.

Remember, saving fuel doesn’t just help your wallet—it reduces wear and tear on your car and lowers your environmental impact. What are your best fuel-saving tips? Let us know in the comments below!

#ecodriving #fuelsavings #drivingtips #savemoneyonfuel #hyperdriving #fuelconsumption #carmaintenance #hypermiling #throttlecontrol #drivingskills

Legal Notice: Unless we have inspected your car we can only provide generic theory. All information is provided without warranty, please check any recommendations made with a mechanic locally to verify it would be legal in your area or region and that it would be suitable for your car and your needs.

[cindyvillagechick]

I hardly use my brakes at all. I love giving myself targets for example not to touch the brakes at roundabouts. So long as traffic isn’t too heavy it is very possible. I had a Mini Cooper D and would consistently achieve 62mpg a tad less in winter months. I have a Mini Cooper 1.5 petrol now and seem to be struggling to achieve 53mpg. Our other car is a BMW 2L D auto. We both get 56mpg but of course braking is hard to avoid.

[philipshore]

Re slipstreaming - I've found some lorries have a second zone much further back where you can get a tow. It's big enough that other vehicles will drop into the gap so it works best when traffic is low. But its way more relaxing that trying to get really close.

[jonathanl]

I had found pulse and gliding very beneficial for my Toyota hybrid in urban and suburban driving (0-60km/h) because it takes advantage of the engine shutting down when letting off the accelerator pedal. It is also easier to disguise pulse and gliding with the the natural ebbs and flows of urban and suburban traffic. I used to average ~24km/L (~4.2L/100km) across fuel tanks by accelerating and braking heavily along with most drivers. These days I now average ~34km/L (~2.9L/100km) across fuel tanks. After a few months of conscious practice I had become more proficient at understanding the minimum amount of throttle to accelerate to my desired speed, reading and anticipating traffic ahead, timing red traffic lights so I often roll through without stopping, and understanding how fast the car naturally decelerates from air and rolling resistance.

Something I figured out with Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive (HSD) is that the hybrid battery's state of charge operates between 40% and 80%, and the HSD operates in a way that aims towards 60% charge. When battery charge is depleted to 40% the petrol engine is forced on to generate some electrical power to store in the battery. When the engine is fired up during acceleration, and battery charge is below 60%, a portion of energy generated by the energy is always used by the HSD through its power split device (the planetary gearbox) to generate electricity to charge the battery. This means I am not accelerating with all my petrol and engine power driving the wheels. When battery charge is at 60%, all petrol consumed and engine power drives the wheels. When battery charge is over 60%, the HSD tries to make headroom for additional energy created by regenerative braking. It does this by using the electric motors more aggressively, either by increasing the threshold of power demand before the engine fires up; or when the engine is fired up, the electric motor assists with a few kW of power so the engine runs at lower throttle.

After understanding the HSD's behaviour around the hybrid battery's charge, it became clear it was optimal to maintain the battery's charge at around 60% to ensure petrol consumed and power generated by the engine is maximised driving the wheels. Pulse and gliding with the ebbs and flows of suburban and urban traffic plays into this because pulses ensure the battery is topped up at 60%, and my glides use little to no battery charge as I decelerate in anticipation of slow/stopped traffic flow ahead. Any additional charge from the few instances I have to regenerative brake (thereby taking my charge slightly above 60%) is soon put back to re-accelerating the car with aggressive electric motor assist and less engine throttle.

[thetruth]

Good info, my experience is that new drivers have learned to drive like Miss Daisy and destroy their cars ASAP.

[Grafyte]

1:06 The rpm of the engine is the size of the bucket. The throttle position is the angle of the bucket. It's true that neither one determines fuel consumption alone, because they both have a direct impact. I don't want anyone thinking that flooring it at low rpm in higher uses more fuel than half throttle at high rpm in a low gear, because that isn't true. Lower rpm is just a way to limit air getting into the engine and less air means less fuel. The nuance here is that excessively low rpm causes heat from combustion to escape into the cylinder block and head, and excessively high rpm tends to cause heat to escape out the exhaust.
Low rpm and thus low piston speeds means lower air intake velocity and poor air/fuel mixing, and the engine can't effectively use all the spent fuel. High rpm allows for the higher velocity to mix the air and fuel, but not as much time to do so which is another disadvantage, plus the higher pumping losses and the pistons racing away from the combustion products. Naturally, somewhere in the middle is a zone where the engine is most thermally efficient. However, there's still more nuance, because an engine might be more thermally efficient at 2200 rpm than 1200, but if the fuel lost from pumping losses is more than the gains of higher combustion efficiency (as is usually the case when traveling downhill or when very little power is needed), then it's still better to use the higher gear with less rpm.

10:44 Pulse and glide is more effective when you have an energy storage device. For example, if you have a hybrid car, you can pulse the car on the engine and then glide on battery power. When the engine shuts off, you drastically reduce the amount energy required to operate the car. Then when it comes back on, you only use it in the most efficient BSFC zone, hopefully store some energy in the battery, restore some speed, then switch to EV mode and glide once more. I find when driving in hilly areas in my manual non hybrid car, I can use my engine's peak BSFC zone to climb the hill, then after I crest the hill, shift to neutral and nearly eliminate the engine's resistances, allowing gravity to propel me. In this case, the terrain is my battery. Pulse and glide is simply useless in a non hybrid car when there is no hill.
In the manner I pulse and glide my non hybrid, maintaining a set speed or actually losing speed in neutral downhill (rather than revving up the engine for "no reason" or nearly no reason because I need 0.1 gallons per hour of "push", but my engine uses 0.2 gallons per hour in neutral idling, but in order to send that 0.1 gallons per hour of "push", I first have to rev the car to 2500 rpm and shift to gear, which will cost me 0.7 GPH, plus the 0.1 GPH of push is 0.8 gallons per hour, or 4x the total fuel consumption to maintain speed downhill, whereas I can shed a mph here and there and just regain it once the road flattens out under peak BSFC) is more efficient than speeding downhill and slowing uphill. For reference, a typical compact sedan requires about 0.7-0.8 GPH of push at 65 mph and around 1-1.1 GPH of push at 75 mph on flat ground.
On more extreme hills (5%grade and up) It's obviously best to leave it in the highest gear that allows you to maintain a safe speed and maintain DFCO when travelling down, and traveling up, you want to go as fast as you can while not going over your BSFC peak. I know my engine's BSFC peak is 2500 rpm at 80% throttle, so if I can do that in 6th at 66 mph, I will do that. If not, I will do it in 5th at 55 mph. If not 5th, then 4th at 42 mph, and so on.

Here's what I found out about coasting in neutral. If you can coast in neutral and maintain a safe and desirable speed, then it is more efficient, point blank. Engine braking is only more efficient if you need to slow down anyway (very very steep hill, traffic light turns red, etc). Personally, when I coast in neutral, my right foot is covering the gas and my right hand is covering the shifter (USA driver, sorry) so I can shift into the exact gear I need in a second or less to reduce the risk of needing to accelerate. More often than not (90-92% of the time) I need to shift into gear to SLOW DOWN (as in, I need DFCO to be more efficient), not to speed up, at those times when I do need to be in gear suddenly.

When it comes to slipstreaming or drafting, I have never measured a difference in using that technique using my scangauge 2. If you follow closely enough, you will be able to notice and measure a difference in fuel consumption, but you will be so close, that your risk of getting into an accident (or suddenly braking and wasting the fuel you were trying to save) is so high, that it could never, ever be worth the practice imo.

22:14 I love your argument here. I live in the US and I actually get my gas and groceries from the same store (costco) so I can combine a grocery trip and a gas trip. The only trouble is that I buy gas twice as often as I buy groceries, not the inverse, so I usually stop for groceries every other fillup, rather than for gas every other grocery run. I have found that removing 80kg of weight from my car (6% the weight of the car) saves me about 1-1.5% on fuel (on mostly highway trips with very little stop/start) so at around 8 gallons of fuel not utilized out of 18, say maybe 22kg of fuel, cut my range down from 560 miles on 16 gallons to 280 miles on 8 gallons (leaving 2 in reserve) I'd save maybe 0.3% on a tank of fuel, which would be 0.024 gallons saved per fillup. At my typical 35 mpg (which would be more than what I'd get going out of the way to get fuel), the round trip distance of the fuel station would have be 0.83 miles out of the way, or less, and at 25 miles per gallon, it would have to be 0.6 miles out of the way or less. Just not worth it plain and simple unless you can combine trips.

[turdburgler]

I drive a 1.8 97 toyota celica ( at200 ), with my driving, I generally fuel up once every 3 weeks.

Not bad for old thing, since purchasing it like 2 months ago, I don't need to add synthetic oil yet, damn good engine.

Loved the video, keep em coming!!

[davidlang]

Another great video from TorqueCars. A lot of thought has obviously gone into making it. Thanks👍.
We have three cars in our household: a turbo diesel which seems most economical around 1400 - 2000; a turbo petrol around the 1600 - 2300 noted here; then a higher reving normally aspirated petrol engine probably around the 2200 to 2800 rpm mark. The biggest savings however are not to drive like you found out that your house is on fire and to anticipate the road ahead.
Years of driving has taught me that driving faster not only uses more fuel, but the reduction in driving time is absolutely negligeable on our congested roads. It also causes far more stress for the driver, passengers and wear to the vehicle.

[Laserman]

Absolutely agree with everything I heard in this video; however, I did not hear - once again- one very specific thing that I found out myself: the electrical system of a car. Make sure it is working in tip-top condition. Spark plug wires, ignition coils, earth connections, the alternator itself and a healthy battery will help MPG a great deal. I recently replaced coils and spark plug wires in my '99 Alfa Romeo 146 Twin Spark and these alone gave me an extra 4+ mpg. I then added a capacitor to the battery and not only got rid of any - very minor - current and voltage drops but also improved my mpg by a further 2-3. This last thing though goes into "car - modding" but it does help the electrical system and the overall operation of all electrical devices on a car.

[eivinstens]

I'm a lorry driver, and I was taught to stay within the RPM green band (where the engine produces the highest torque) to save fuel when pulling up hill. Yes, you can get even more power to the wheels by shifting down, but that will cost you fuel. I don't know how this applies to lighter vehicles, though.

[alexpunter]

I had a Mkvii golf 1.6 tdi, better mpg in sport mode for motorway driving, eco mode in the city. Now driving a transporter campervan, wind resistance is an mpg killer over 60mph. At 80mph (or more accurately 130kmh on French autoroute) it can be 15mpg lower.

[davidellis]

I ignore gear advice on dashboard as for me it’s too low but still get long average of 61 mpg 2lt diesel and on one journey had 70mpg at constant speed. I also keep reasonable distance and lift off to slow instead of breaking. 62, 000 miles no break pad change.

[elliotbcfcVTEC]

Learning to use less brakes and don't idle the vehicle I would say are the biggest factors for most people to learn. I have commuted (around 10 miles) many times without touching my brakes at all, albeit at quiet times on the road but it does take practice and you have to find a balance of using less brakes and not holding up traffic. I drive a 2006 Honda Jazz and get almost 60mpg (1.4 petrol engine). Pulse and glide method sounds horrible, there's nothing worse than being around a car that is doing that or worse being passenger. Slower driving speeds and lower revs are always bug factors (assuming you are not lugging the engine). Tyre pressure and type of tyre, alignment and servicing are also factors (fresh oil in engine and gearbox = less friction = less wear and more efficiency). Don't forget to check the brakes aren't binding and that the wheel bearings are in good condition.

[BubblesTheCat]

Slipstreaming a lorry in South Africa is almost guaranteed to get your windscreen cracked by a stone thrown out under the lorry's tyres. I stay far away from lorries, and in any case, if you want to overtake them, it's not a good idea to be right on the lorry's arse. Then you can't see properly or accelerate in time. I keep a distance from the lorry, read the road, and then floor it to get past. I'm talking here of single lane roads, not freeways. On freeways, just stay away from trucks and don't dawdle next to them or in their blind spots. You don't want to be next to a lorry's tyre if that decides to blow.

[Semponi]

Once told best way to drive for economy was try to keep revs at maximum torque when accelerating / cruising as much possible, obviously other factors have to be taken into account. Also, because cruise operates reactively, I sometimes switch from auto to manual on undulating roads to make use of gravity and anticipate need to use accelerator. As well as keeping tyres at correct pressure, it's important to use suitable tyre type / size.
Thanks for another greatly informative video.

[WolvesInferno]

Great video as usual TorqueCars. I drive a 2013 Toyota Auris 1.8 Hybrid. I'm definitely a hypermiler for sure. I seem to consistently get around 68 to 80 mpg going at 58 to 64 mph. I do get much higher mpg around town though. Town driving gets me between 80 to 90 mpg. Even though it's a Hybrid and I don't have to worry about what gear I should be in, I do read the road ahead all the time, anticipate the traffic lights, etc.

[boycie]

I find the VW DSGs all try to climb the gears way too quickly. Before remapping, my DQ200 used to cause dangerous engine lugging quite frequently. I much prefer driving in ‘manual’ mode, which also seems to be more economical as I can keep it in the 2-2.5k rpm Goldilocks zone you mentioned. Great video as ever, thank you. 👌

[james]

1.6tdi 2012 Octavia, auto 7 speed. Tank takes 53 liters. Max miles is 590. Sometimes 620miles. Drive slower and use cruse control. Tyres over inflated to 35psi. No load in the car. The best car for mileage per tank I had was the 407 1.6 tdi. It done 50 more miles than the Octavia. Same tank. Would love a big fuel tank in a car. I did see a tank you can add into where you keep the spare wheel. 20ltrs more to the cars capacity.

[kalcijs]

One of the best channels i found recently, thanks for Your work! Really like Your videos and detailed approach.

[MXXQ]

I find that in my RS6 which has an 8-speed automatic box, motorway cruising at ~70Mph, 8th gear driven with around 1500RPM is ample without labouring the engine, some motorway inclines require me to manually drop it into 7th gear to maintain the sweet spot.

Having these two additional overdrive gears helps a lot, however I intentionally disable the active cylinder system, the concept is brilliant for the 4.0 TFSI motor however in practice it's a costly system to repair when, it inevitably fails and kills the engine, so I turn it off, and for 90% of the time I drive in semi-auto mode as I prefer to have control over the gear selection, especially when I want to use engine braking for slowing down becuase, like most auto boxes, when descending down a hill, or rolling up to a junction, the TCU will selected the highest gear possible for the road speed/engine load combination, and you inevitably end up riding the brakes so holding the car in 2nd or 3rd depending on the gradient saves my brakes too.

I did an experiment a while back whilst on a business trip to see a client, I was in no real hurry to get there as I was travelling the evening prior so I drove from my home in Newcastle, to Bridlington via the A19 which is mostly dual carriageway, and I decided to sync my cruise control to a convoy of trucks in the inside lane, for most of that journey until I left the A19 on to the winding roads, I never disengaged the cruise control and sat at ~56Mph, including the combined driving of the towns either side of my trip and the dual carriageway, I returned 34MPG in 8 cylinder mode, which for such a big engine I though was rather impressive.

So, like you say, it varies from car to car on how best to drive economically and finding that sweet sopt is trial and error, but as a comparison, on the return journey home from the former trip, mentally I was in get home mode with the RS6 in dynamic mode, lots of overtaking and hard driving and I used twice as much fuel on the return journey as I did on the outbound journey, time difference? Well, it was something like 45mins quicker getting home, much more fun albeit.

As a driver, once we understand the wins of using momentum and forward planning, the savings in fuel consumption can be massive, although if like me you enjoy frequent spirited driving, it all kind of balances out in the end.

[niceboy]

I ve got a New Peugeut 408 and for a Petrol MPG is very impressive
I got around 57 Mpg motorway and around 32 mpg stop start traffic
Auto Allows Neutral Gearbox when driving it goes all the way to 8th gear and car does a MPG report on every Trip so you can compare