What Can You Do To Save Money When Motoring?

With the price of petrol hitting $135 a barrel this week, prices at the pumps hit 114p per liter, diesel around 123p a liter, so can you do anything to cut the costs of motoring? Aside from converting your car to run on LPG there are a few ways you can try and economize your fuel consumption when driving. For starters there are ways that your driving actions can be adjusted to be more economical.

Keep your speed down to 55 to 65 mile per hour as this is regarded as the most fuel efficient speed to drive at. If you go faster your fuel consumption will increase. Don't break or accelerate very suddenly at high speeds, try and move smoothly through the gears without over revving the engine. Additional revs mean more fuel consumption and being less aggressive like this could save you up to a staggering 30 per cent on fuel consumption. Experts say that the best time to change up a gear is 2500 revs per minute (RPM) for a petrol car and 2000 RPM for a diesel car. Maintaining your car well is another good way to keep your cars fuel consumption as good as possible. Take off any unused roof racks or old tyres and so on, decluttering your car will help it shed a few pounds and a lighter car is a more fuel efficient car. Keeping your tyres pumped up correctly will also contribute to a better fuel consumption, by up to around 10 per cent of your fuel bill. Also a good old fashioned service will assure your engine is at peak performance.

Think about when you use your car and if it really is necessary, i.e. don't use the car for short journeys. When it comes to air conditioning try not to use it if you're traveling under 40 miles per hour, try opening the windows! I know this is perhaps something we'd all love to do but try to avoid the rush hour traffic! sitting in traffic jams during peak road congestion times isn't good for fuel consumption because of the stop and start, changing up and down gears motions.

Of course you could go for a hybrid or LPG car like I said. These use a combination of a normal petrol or diesel engine along with either a battery (in duel fuel cars) or LPG gas (in LPG cars). The battery motor in a Hybrid car will take over at low speed and then the petrol engine takes over at high speeds. An LPG car starts up using the normal petrol engine and then you can switch to the gas power as soon as you like. The other main benefits of using 'green' cars are the lower fuel prices, LPG is currently around 49.9p per liter and also lower car tax and no congestion charge in London.