I drive about 40 miles to work each day. Home is about 1300 feet elevation and work is about 500 feet. It's amusing to see how much better mileage I get going to work. Usually it's around 62 or so mpg, but the round trip mileage drops to about 58 after the return climb.

I've read in places that one shouldn't worry too much about hills because what you lose going up, you gain back on the way down the other side. I'm not so sure about this and that's why I'm writing, to see what other HCHers think.

My route has several monster hills that are more than a mile in length. They make for fabulous coasting, but oh it is sheer dispair to have to watch your trip mileage fall like a stone as you drive up them.

So thinking about that, I found on a map where I could drive around a couple mountains instead of over them. I was pleasantly surprised to see my trip to work this morning was 62.4 mpg and the trip home had improved to 61 and change instead of the 58 I was getting.

Maybe it doesn't matter if the hills you climb are little blips, but if they're mountains, I seem to do better avoiding them. What have others experienced? --tom

 

I've found that the best mileage comes from the least steep climb possible (duh!) but also the most gradual descent possible where you can still maintain glide. We ran errands last weekend and left home (6,300') and Trip B was still over 100mpg when I got to downtown (5,700') 10 miles away on the most gradual route I could find. From there, another route that avoided all steep hills home and kept the mileage at 67.8 mpg for the whole 35 miles of city driving. The adventursome might see some really crazy milage on the same route with FAS, but that's more work than it's worth (when you're getting almost 70 (!) in town).

At first I thought it was really hard to get great mileage at altitude, but I'm starting to think that altitude could be an advantage. If you can climb a .5 mile hill at 35mpg and then descend the whole same .5mi at 0gpm, that would net out to a constant 70mpg wouldn't it?

Edit: Do you do your whole 40 mile commute on one reset of Trip B? You might try breaking it up into sections and resetting every 10mi occasionally so you can see more variation in the reading. You will be more likely to notice what style works best for what hill with your FE meter moving.