Why does braking gradually and accelerating slowly give a car better gas mileage?

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Does this advice apply to all cars?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Difficult to ELI5 because it’s involving physics/math, but I’ll give an analogy.

Let’s say you’ve got a shopping cart loaded up with items. It’s hard to push, but with a little lean it will start moving and by the end of the aisle you’ll be pushing at a good walking speed, and it was never exhausting. Now if you wanted to get that cart up to walking speed really quickly, then you’d really need to shove into it hard, and this would be tiring overall even though it’s over quickly.

So if you want your car to move fast, you need to burn a lot of gas! This actually burns more gas then letting it gently speed up over more time.

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