The Race Begins
On a summer Saturday in a Madison, Wisconsin, parking lot, about a dozen people stand around a red Honda Insight. They’re watching Wayne Gerdes prepare for his run in the inaugural Hybridfest MPG Challenge, a 20-mile race through the streets of the city. Wayne is the odds-on favorite to win the event, in which drivers compete to push automotive limits, not of speed and power–a desire those gathered here consider old-fashioned and wasteful–but for the unsexy title of World's Most Fuel-Efficient Driver.
Wayne is believed to be that driver, but he's nervous. All day, his fellow hypermilers (the term he invented to describe those obsessed with fuel efficiency) have been getting crazy-high miles-per-gallon readings, up to 100 mpg. For the race, Wayne has borrowed a friend's Insight. To decrease the car's mass, he has jettisoned everything not screwed down. The detritus–a pillow, towels, cleaning stuff, a tool kit–sits on a nearby blanket.
What can't be removed is Wayne himself. At six-foot-one and 210 pounds, he looks too big for the two-seater. ("I would love to lose 60 pounds," he says. "It would help my fuel economy.") And in Wayne's world, fuel efficiency is about the driver. He doesn't get high mileage by tinkering with engines, using funky fuels or, usually, driving a hybrid. He gets it by driving hyperconsciously.
Wayne takes out his wallet and keys, then takes off his shoes. "He's speeding," a voice says as he exits the lot doing maybe 15 mph. He makes a full loop on the lot's exit road to slow down so he won't have to brake for traffic. Wayne hates braking.
Two nights earlier, on a clammy 80-degree Chicago evening, I wait for Wayne at the airport. The car he's driving, a 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid, drifts over like a jellyfish to pick me up. Around Wayne, drivers in four lanes are accelerating hard, weaving erratically, grinding to a halt. To him, these are the driving habits of the ignorant and wasteful—which is to say, nearly all of us. Wayne's car glides to a stop as if it's run out of gas. He has stopped without braking.
The car is owned by his friend Terry Honaker, who, with his wife, Cathy, is along for the ride. Inside it's hotter and more humid than outside. As we take off–or, more accurately, as the vehicle rolls forward really slowly–I notice all four windows are closed and the air-conditioning is off.
We take the interstate to Wayne's house. The speed limit is 55, and most of the traffic is zipping past at 75 or so, but Wayne hovers around 50. He's riding the white line on the right side of the right-hand lane. "It’s called ridge-riding," he explains, using another term he invented. He ridge-rides to let people behind him know that he's moving slowly. The tactic is especially useful in the rain because it gets the wheels out of the road's puddly grooves. My back and butt, meanwhile, are starting to stick to the seat.
An SUV flies by. Wayne says, "That’s getting 10 to 13 miles per gallon climbing this hill. We're getting about 80." I'm thinking he drives like a 90-year-old in a mobile sweat lodge. Soon I'll see I'm wrong.
"Buckle up," he says. "This is the death turn." Death turn? At 50 mph?
Wayne shuts off the engine. Bearing down on an exit, he turns the wheel sharply to the right. The tires squeal, which is what they do when you take a 25 mph turn going 50. Cathy grabs my leg. I grab the door handle.
We glide for more than a mile with the engine off, past a gas station, through a green light (Wayne is always timing green lights) and around a mall, using momentum in a way that would make Isaac Newton proud.
"Are we going to attempt that at home?" Cathy asks Terry, a talkative man who has been silent since Wayne executed the death turn in his car.
"Not in this lifetime," he says.
Unlike most hypermilers, the world's most fuel-efficient driver doesn't own a hybrid. Wayne sold his own Insight two years ago and bought a 2005 Accord (he wanted the power mirrors, heated leather seats and state-of-the-art navigation system). He uses the Accord for the two-hour commute to his job as an operator at a nuclear power plant. His wife drives an Acura MDX, a seven-seater with a 3.5-liter V-6 engine that bills itself as the Driver's SUV. Wayne also owns a Ford Ranger pickup, which he used to haul equipment when he had a landscaping business on the side.
The morning after I arrive, we pile into the truck for a supermarket run. Wayne starts it by releasing the emergency brake and shifting into neutral before jumping out and pushing the 3,300-pound vehicle down his sloping driveway with the engine off. He jumps in and, without braking, turns right, swerves around a dead skunk, then takes a left turn–again, no brakes–to a stop sign. Ahead, the light is red. "This is a long light," he says. "I'm screwed. We have to throw it away."
"Throw it away" is how Wayne describes what most of us do with gasoline. We throw it away when we accelerate fast, turn on the AC, leave heavy stuff in the trunk, drive with a roof rack, don’t change the oil, underinflate the tires, roll down the windows, or speed, brake or idle. Wayne hates to throw anything away.
Driving for a Good Cause
Even parking isn't routine with Wayne, as I learn when he chooses an isolated spot in the mall parking lot. "This is potential parking with a face-out," he says. Potential parking, he says, is when you park in a lot's highest point. That lets you rely on gravity, not the engine, to get going. A face-out is what it sounds like: facing out into the open lot. This lets a driver avoid backing up, braking, then moving forward. "Nobody uses it," he says, "but they darn well should."
Driving out, we come to the top of a small hill. Wayne says he's doing a forced auto stop, putting the car in neutral, turning off the engine and gliding. It's illegal in some places–you can lose your power brakes and steering–but it's a favorite hypermiling trick.
On the way home, a woman in a gray sedan zips around us to catch a green light, but she’s too late and has to slam on the brakes. "That made no sense," Wayne says. "She's sitting there with the car running and she's going to tear out of here." And that's what she does. (One study found that fast starts and hard stops cut travel time by just 4 percent–75 seconds on a half-hour trip.)
As we approach his subdivision, Wayne coasts down to 30 mph, then to 25, letting inertia do the brakes' job. Three cars are bunched behind him, and a guy in a Ford Explorer honks. "They can honk all day," Wayne says.
Wayne's driving obsession began after 9/11. Before then, he drove 75 miles per hour in the left-hand lane. In the wake of the attacks, he vowed to limit his reliance on Middle Eastern oil. As Wayne sees it, Al Qaeda got its operating funds from Western consumers buying Saudi oil: "If Osama bin Laden didn’t have money to burn, he wouldn’t have been able to do what he did. There was a direct relationship between our addiction to oil and the World Trade Center."
Wayne believes that if we all boosted our fuel economy by 25 percent (less than the 50 percent improvement he gets), we could halve the amount of Middle Eastern oil we import for our cars. That would be a boon to a broader economy and a step against global warming. "I'm not doing this just for myself," he says. "I'm doing this for my country and the world."
In 2002 Wayne bought a Toyota Corolla to replace his 1999 Nissan truck. Online he saw "guys in Priuses bragging about 44 mpg, and I was doing better in a Corolla." But it was his wife's SUV, with its fuel-consumption display showing mpg in real time, that inspired Wayne's zeal for fuel economy. He could see how little things–slight movements of his foot, uphill accelerations–affected fuel efficiency. He learned to wring 30 mpg from the MDX; most people get 18. If consumption displays were required in all cars sold in America, he decided, fuel use would drop by 20 percent.
On the road to Madison, I ask Wayne what it takes to be a hypermiler. "Foot control, hand-eye coordination and anticipation," he says. Like an athlete, Wayne senses action on the field–in his case, the road–before it unfolds.
Minutes later, he exclaims, "I forgot my ice vest." The vest, which he wears at work, is his secret weapon. "You can drive at 95 degrees with an ice vest, and it doesn't feel like 95." He expects his car to be warm during the challenge: "No electricity, no air, no fans."
The two dozen competitors begin driving the Hybridfest MPG Challenge course at about 9 a.m. Wayne expects his most serious rival will be Randall Burkhalter, the only driver ever to break one of Wayne's mpg records. The two met online at websites like cleanmpg.com and greenhybrid.com. After Burkhalter finishes his run, the best of the day at a 108.5 mpg average, Wayne congratulates him, calling him top dog.
Then a shout comes from the crowd. There's a new front-runner: 17-year-old Justin Fons, clocking 117.2 mpg. Justin says his father taught him to drive, but "the person I learned to drive efficiently from is Wayne Gerdes."
By the time Wayne finishes, it's after 5 p.m. With his head sticking out the window (his breath fogged the windshield, and he won't use the defroster), he honks to get a judge's attention. His fuel-consumption display reads 150 mpg–the highest possible. Then the car's owner switches the display to show liters per 100 kilometers (a higher limit). The reading: 180.91 mpg.
At that night's awards dinner, Wayne gets a subscription to Green Car Journal and a $25 gas card. For all we know, he's still using it.
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