Man vs Mileage

Creative Loafing

With the click of his seatbelt, it's time to begin his 52-mile commute to the plant in North Carolina. Seamlessly, he swiftly turns the key in the ignition, cuts on his headlights, presses the clutch and gives the gas pedal a measured and deliberate amount of pressure. Then, he shifts back to neutral and kills the engine. At the end of his gravel driveway, he veers left onto the winding, hilly, two-lane country road and coasts for about half a mile. When his speed gets down to just above a crawl, he turns the key in the ignition, accelerates up to 45 miles per hour before shifting to neutral and repeats the process. During the 10 miles it takes to get to I-26, he'll likely cut his car off five or six times.

"I've had folks say 'the Martians are coming,'" Turner chuckles. "People take pictures of my car on cell phones everywhere I drive." He's even been stopped by curious cops a few times but never ticketed. (After all, it's not a crime to look crazy.) Turner is unfazed by the attention. What he is fazed by, however, is his mileage efficiency and the gas he saves. Because, no matter what people think or say, his hyped-up hooptie averages more than 70 miles per gallon -- and that's not a figure that can be ignored.

Going under the screen name of "basjoos" on CleanMPG.com, a site that lets drivers track daily mileage and share information, Turner is just one of a growing legion of people who identify themselves as hypermilers. They make up a community of drivers committed to taking the edge off of rapidly rising fuel costs through a combination of practical design and driving-style modifications, and in some cases, controversial techniques. These drivers come from all walks of life, aspire to different hypermiling goals and have varying motivations.

Leerberg's miles per gallon increased 40 percent immediately. When he calculated it, he realized that if he just held himself to these basic techniques, he could save $600-$700 per year. Not exactly chump change, and anybody could do it. But a 40-percent savings wasn't enough. He wanted more.

"It's the numbers. I love crunching numbers," explains Leerberg. "That's what's fun about it. It's trying to get your numbers up. I was just getting 25, which is 100-percent EPA for a long time. Now, I'm up to, like, 160-percent EPA because I've been getting, like, 42 or 43 mpg."

"If someone is blocking the lane -- what we call the 'left lane bandit' -- and you're tailgating a person that just won't move over, well you have to move over to the right, pass them and then move over to the left again," says James, whose Web site is www.drdriving.com. "A lot of drivers do this maneuver emotionally so that they floor the gas pedal when they pass on the right and then often look at the driver as they go by and give them what we call a 'stink eye,' showing their disapproval," he continues. "It's kind of a retaliation. And so as they execute this, they accelerate much faster than is necessary to pass, creating perhaps an unsafe situation.