See the little arrow on the instrument cluster below? Right up at the top center. There's a yellow LED in there that lately, I've been trying to keep off as much as possible. It's the one leftover of the last gas crisis that I think we need to bring back: the fuel-economy-based shift light. If you have an early-80s VW or a mid-80s Plymouth Horizon or Dodge Omni, you probably recognize this feature. It uses a vacuum signal from the intake manifold and some simple relay-driven electronics to to indicate when you could be driving in a higher gear, and prods you to upshift by lighting up the arrow. I find that mine works pretty well, but it can lead to driving a lot harder than you would think possible for fuel economy. To keep it from lighting, you have to be at idle or close to WOT. The light is locked out in the top gear. I've been fooling around with minor tuning tweaks for the past couple of weeks, and combined with judicious minding of the light, I'm up to 30mpg in some really bad traffic. If I ignore the light, I drop down to about 27 or 28mpg. Considering that this is a 1.7L engine in a 2100 pound car, that's not all that fantastic, but I am pretty impressed that the light does what it sets out to do—guides me to driving more efficiently. I find that I miss it when I'm driving my wagon, although the boost gauge on that car does a fair job as long as I stick to the algorithm—idle or WOT, no in-betweens. Do you have a car with a fuel economy shift light? Post up!
Mitglieder-Artikel 
VW
(0 Bewertung)
... follow us!