Transportation is a necessity, and a costly one in 2026. But, like with all belt-tightening measures, people have found rather creative ways around sky-high charges at the pump. One Connecticut woman even managed to inadvertently increase her car’s mileage by 25% by simply changing one thing about her driving: her passing habits.
After consciously slowing down on the road to maintain her own peace of mind during what had become a very stressful daily commute, Sarah Holmes noticed that hovering around or below the speed limit, as well as avoiding overtaking other cars, upped her Subaru’s mileage efficiency from 24 mpg to 30 mpg.
While it may give people around her certain opinions of her driving, she shrugged this off to Business Insider.
“People think I drive slow, whatever,” she told the outlet. “The general perception is that I’m just a nervous driver, not that I’m doing it intentionally to remove my nerves, which is fine.”
‘Hypermiling’ is nothing new, but is seeing a resurgence
The appeal of switching up small behind-the-wheel practices to reap noticeable savings isn’t a novel concept, but has understandably been revived in recent months as oil prices have soared.
Some of these particularly petrol-aware persons use the term “hypermiling,” which originated in the early 2000s to describe using various tactics to optimize fuel use, often well beyond a car’s stated consumption ratings.
Thousands still participate in online communities where they share tips to “go further on every drop” of gas, from skipping out on air conditioning and employing cruise control to riding behind transport trucks for better aerodynamics and measuring daily usage in detail on dedicated apps.
Some of the most basic strategies from Wayne Gerdes, the original hypermiler himself, include — depending on make and model — fiddling with tire pressure and oil types, changing air filters more often, and ensuring your car is as empty as possible, with no extraneous items weighing it down.
“My son’s girlfriend the other day showed up in her Grand Am, and she’s talking about her fuel economy, she’s getting about 18 mpg for a Grand Am that’s rated 25 combined,” he famously told a 2008 crowd as a prime example.
“I said ‘let me take a look at your car,’ and we opened up the trunk. She had 500 pounds of books in the trunk, the whole thing was packed from one side to the other.”
