Car Care Council offers tips to help save money at pump

Consumers’ chronic pain at the pump is returning with gas prices 67 percent higher than a year ago and probably heading back toward $3 a gallon soon. While you can’t control the price of gas, you can control how much gas you burn by performing proper maintenance and how you drive. Performing simple and inexpensive maintenance can save as much as $1,200 per year in gas costs.

The Car Care Council offers these gas-saving maintenance and driving tips:

• Keep your car properly tuned to improve gas mileage by an average of percent percent.
• Keep tires properly inflated and improve gas mileage by three percent.
• Replace dirty or clogged air filters and improve gas mileage by as much as 10 percent.
• Replace dirty spark plugs, which can reduce mileage by two miles per gallon.
• Change oil regularly and gain another mile per gallon.
• Observe the speed limit. Gas mileage decreases rapidly above 60 mph.
• Avoid excessive idling. Idling gets zero miles per gallon. Warming up the vehicle for one or two minutes is sufficient.
• Avoid quick starts and stops. Aggressive driving can lower gas mileage by 33 percent on the highway and five percent in the city.
• Consolidate trips. Several short trips taken from a cold start can use twice as much gas as one longer multi-purpose trip.
• Don’t haul unneeded items in the trunk. An extra 100 pounds in the trunk reduces fuel economy by one to two percent.

Visit www.carcare.org and check out the free digital Car Care Guide.

—Rich White Executive Director Car Care Council

This is part of the February 10, 2010 online edition of Frost Illustrated.

Have an opinion on this matter? We'd like to hear from you. Click here.