re: Cruise control and gas mileage

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I come from a long line of self-indulgent tight arses. And because I had time and nothing better to do.

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Driving 10MPH slower than the average speed of travel makes you six times more likely to be involved in an accident. You were probably driving about 20mph slower than the average speed of travel. I don’t even know the stats on that level of absurdity.

Buddy of mine has a Silverado 1500 with the 3.0 diesel. Cruises 70mph and gets over 30 mpg. I’m seriously considering one.

What's gas mileage?

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Seriously? Are you making that up?

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Someone make something up on the internet?!?

Jokes aside, no. Now, I'm sure the 6x number is highly variable, but it's widely accepted that the safest driving scenario is for all vehicles to be driving roughly the same speed (assuming that speed is within their ability to drive; ask everyone to drive 120mph and things obviously go off the rails). Anyone who deviates substantially from the norm, whether faster or slower, poses significant risks to their fellow drivers.

The issues with driving much faster than the norm are obvious: you're either going to have to quickly weave in and out of traffic to maintain your speed, or you're going to frequently have to hard brake to keep from running into the backs of other vehicles.

The issues with driving much slower than the norm are less intuitive, but are actually identical, just in the inverse, and multiplied many times over because of how our brains process "looming hazards". If you're curious, there are entire books written on the subject, but this is the short version: if you're driving and you see, say, an overturned 18 wheeler in the road, your brain is going to process that as a problem basically immediately and from miles away. On the other hand, if there is a disabled vehicle in the middle of the interstate, otherwise fine and facing the correct direction, your brain won't process that as a problem for an alarmingly long time. Basically, our brains aren't very good at discerning speed and distance unless the object is crossing our field of vision. Our proxy for that for objects in our line of sight is looking at the relative size of objects over time. So yes, while that disabled vehicle facing the correct direction will get larger and larger, that's not abnormal enough to trigger alarm bells in your head. It's not until you are dangerously close to the vehicle that the speed its size is "growing" becomes abnormal, and therefore alarming, and therefore something you will react to. That's why this kind of hazard is among the most dangerous on the road, and why massive pileups happen on the interstate.

Now, obviously you're not stopped on the interstate creating some of the most dangerous conditions imaginable, but you can likely see where this is going. People aren't going to be expecting you to be driving 20mph slower than they are, and because of the way our brains work, they likely won't notice until they are nearly on top of you. Because you are "only" going 20mph slower instead of 70mph slower, they aren't likely to rear end you, but think back to the person driving faster than average and what they have to do to avoid accidents: weaving and hard braking.

But instead of just a few abnormally fast vehicles causing issues by weaving and hard braking, now literally every other vehicle on the road is having to either weave or hard brake in reaction to the looming hazard you've created, because relative to you, they are all the abnormally fast vehicle.

This is my chance to remind everyone of my campaign to make all speeds limits be minimum speed instead of maximum speed.

Also, you should change your title to “speed and gas mileage”.

Nothing you posted has anything to do with cruise control.

Nobody is reading that wall of text.

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Mine gets 87mpg when I set the cruise on 110mph.

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I did 170 and got arrested by a Colorado State trooper for making gas. He must have been in the pocket of big oil.

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That’s the reason they gave us for lowering the speed limit to 55 back in the day. They wanted to conserve fuel since there were shortages.

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And it was true in the 70's because cars were tanks with only 4 gears. Now most cars have a 5th gear and are more efficient around 63 or so.

OP could probably save more money if he wasn't towing his house all the time.