In school we learned ” what you save in energy, you have to increase the way.” By that rule you should use the exact same amount of energy (fuel) for the same distance no matter what speed. I’ve asked a few people, but no-one could give me a good answer.
In: 15
Some good answers already, but one thing I think is worth mentioning:
Imagine that you have to do a 1-hour drive, for example, with traffic lights and crosswalks every few minutes. Each one of those ‘obstacles’ in the road will make you slow down to a reasonable driving speed, so that you can check for pedestrians or even fully stop for a red light. After every time that you slow down, you want to build up back to the speed you were driving at, basically the speed you want to cruise in. If you want to reach 40 MPH, you have to feed the engine with an increased amount of gas to get to that speed, and then feed it a regular amount to stay in that speed. If you want to reach 60 MPH you would have to feed it an increased amount for a longer period of time after every obstacle and slow-down. Also, at that increased speed the amount you would have to constantly feed it just to keep driving at that speed is increased, as other people have mentioned, due to air resistance, mostly.
That is why sometimes people say that using the brakes wastes gas – it’s not that it takes gas to use the brakes to slow down, it’s that you already put in gas to built up that speed, and braking basically gives up that speed. Idealy, you would want to drive at speeds that are optimized for the road you’re on, if there are a lot of things causing you to slow down and speed up, in order to use the breaks as little as possible – that way you know you’re using the amount of gas you actually need.
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