Influence of gear changing behaviour on fuel-use and vehicular exhaust emissions

I found a study where the researchers found a relation between the time when the driver changed gears and the fuel use/exhaust emissions. The results show that when changing gears early one can reduce fuel consumption by 30% on average and prevent the extra exhaust emissions due to running up the engine.

This is a simple trick that everyone can apply in its own driving behavior that has directly a noticeable impact. We as engineers all know this but there are a lot of people that are not aware how much impact this has or what is the optimal time to change gears.

I noticed that in some newer car models the on-board diagnostic system warns the driver when he should change gears, this is a step in the good direction. But also the increase of automatic gearboxes with more gear ratios can have a positive impact.

Do you have a good driving behavior or can you still improve? Here is also a fragment of Topgear where Jeremy Clarkson has a solution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while still driving in heavy polluting cars.

3 thoughts on “Influence of gear changing behaviour on fuel-use and vehicular exhaust emissions

  1. I didn’t know that changing gears could have an impact that large. If more people would know this, then probably more people will pay more attention to it. Because less fuel consumption is good for the money.
    Nowadays a lot of cars also have an indicator that shows how much they are consuming with their driving style. Along with automatic gears, this will have an impact on the fuel consumption. But isn’t this yet another small improvement instead of the large improvements like electric cars or hydrogen cars?

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  2. If this changing gear behavior really has such an good result, then this knowledge really should be spread to every one. But I agree with the last comment that electric car or hydrogen car is large improvement compared to this. And also, though people know this knowledge, I’m sure most of people will not pay much attention to that. At least in China, most of people don’t have a good driving behavior and they also don’t care about that.

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  3. sylunchhorn says:

    Well, in fact i am also the newbie that heard about changing gears will impact to the reduce of fuel consumption. However, our main issue to deal with nowadays is CO2. It’s global warming which is the bad thing, because that will mess up the streams in the sea and melt Ice on the poles. We have to or must fix that before we mess up the oceans natural refreshment system and melt all the ice. Follow the video, the other gasses are harming, but they are not the true problem for us. That doesn’t mean factories should dump their waste in lakes either.

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