In this 2-in-1 article I discuss why Asians are bad drivers, and how to save gas.
ASIANS ARE BAD DRIVERS:
Asians are notoriously frugal (because their parents instilled them these ideas or because they value money, etc.). They are trying to save gas and maintenance costs...
-Distance: Asians will maintain a larger distance from the car in front of them than most people. In fact, I usually maintain a distance of 2-4 times the average distance between cars. This has the disadvantage of allowing other cars to cut in; however, it serves the advantage of reducing the frequency of breaking and accelerating. If the car in front breaks, the Asian does not have to hit the breaks every time, and therefore no momentum is lost. Momentum conservation is a key theme in gas preservation.
-Red lights: Asians break the convention of cruising/rushing to the pedestrian line and obediently stopping at the red light. Instead, Asians will slowly drift towards the red light, hoping for it to turn green so they can continue accelerating without sacrificing all of their momentum.This will piss a lot of people off and they will complain that the Asian is driving too slowly.
-Shade: Asians will hog shade from the truck beside them if it is a very sunny day, and if traffic is slow.This will piss people off because the Asians will often stop prematurely at a red light, or go slower than usual during a traffic jam with an ever-growing distance between himself and the car in front.
-Going uphill: Asians will try to start going uphill very fast, then gradually slow down over the course of the uphill stretch, to save gas (more on this later). This will obviously piss a lot of people off, particularly if the Asian is in the fast lane and in the "slow" phase of going uphill, or if for some reason the Asian had to slow down due to cars in front of him and is now cruising at 60 mph refusing to go faster until the incline ends (I always switch out of the fast lane if this happens but sometimes there are too many cars in the other lane, and also, even next-to-fast lane cars don't want to be stuck behind 60 mph; for the record I blame the cars in front of me that were going at 65 mph which forces me to slow from 70 to 60).
DISCLAIMER: If you are offended by this (for which I do not blame you, even if you are not Asian) by all means feel free to substitute "Max Loh" for "Asians", because I basically just talked about how I drive.
THE ART OF SAVING GAS:
-DISTANCE: Distance is great not only for safety purposes but also for saving gas. If the car in front of you breaks and you are only 5 feet behind him, you will be forced to break, sacrificing your momentum. However, if you are 100 feet behind him you can simply take your foot off the gas pedal; chances are he will start accelerating again after a couple seconds anyway. This "buffer" reduces the amount of breaking and accelerating. Many aggressive drivers like to rush from car to car, always accelerating then breaking then tailgating. These people are not good at saving gas.
-RED LIGHTS: Do not simply cruise/accelerate to the red light and then break at the end like a normal person. In fact, you must apply the brakes UNCOMFORTABLY EARLY. At a red light you always want to maximize your "expected speed" when the light turns green. There are probably advanced statistics models for how to calculate this, but they are not practical and we must rely on estimation. If you are going too fast, you minimize the DURATION over which you can take advantage of your leftover momentum. If you are going too slow, you minimize the QUANTITY of your leftover momentum but increase the duration for which you can take advantage of said leftover momentum. So, one must strike a middle ground. Always apply your brakes such that the "expected turn green point in time" coincides with your car hitting the pedestrian line. If there are one or more cars waiting at the light, the problem becomes much more complicated as you have to account for the time it takes all of them to begin moving.
-GOING UPHILL: ALWAYS START GOING UPHILL AS FAST AS POSSIBLE. A car going uphill for 1 mile at 100 mph will use much less gas than a car going uphill for 1 mile at 10 mph. Physics explanation: Assume no air resistance, blablabla etc, a car needs a force of F just to keep it moving at same speed or staying still, if going uphill. Would you rather apply F (aka use gas) over the course of 5 minutes or 2 minutes? The less time you need to apply F, the better. Also, INCREASE YOUR SPEED DURING VALLEYS. There will be uphills and downhills throughout your driving and you should try to "increase your speed" (I use this term instead of accelerate, which might mean simply pressing the gas pedal, which you should always be doing) while at the bottom of a downhill to uphill scenario.
Physics explanation: Assume a model in which we have a car that goes downhill for 1 mile then uphill for 1 mile. Now, given an impulse F*t which we can all agree is representative of the amount of gas you will be using, and you can only apply this impulse either during the downhill or during the uphill stretch. Now, common sense tells us that the end result will actually be the SAME no matter what, because change in momentum = impulse. In fact I thought this for a long time and was convinced that my uphill gas-saving strategy was based on superstition.
However, COUNTEREXAMPLE (refer to NICE PHYSICS DRAWING): Assume the uphill stretch is a bit longer than the downhill stretch, such that if you did nothing at all, your car would roll down the downhill, and up the uphill... almost crossing the finish line... but then roll backwards back down the hill. Let's imagine you are allowed to use F force for 60 seconds, and F is EXACTLY the amount of force necessary to keep the car either staying still or same speed while on the uphill stretch. So if you apply this force F at the near-end of your car's journey, where it's almost crossing the finish line and its velocity is exactly 0 and it's about to fall back down, you will net a whopping ZERO METERS in distance no matter how long you accelerate for! Because F is exactly the amount of force necessary to keep the car either staying still or same speed while going uphill. If you were to apply the force at some other time such as when the car was going fast at the bottom of the valley, one can clearly imagine that this would increase the car's velocity and allow it to clear the finish line. So how is this paradox explained?
When gravity comes into play, your NET impulses are actually different, even though the impulse due to the effort from the car is identical in both situations. Instead of pointing out why these are different, which is hard even for me to wrap my mind around, allow me to re-phrase this qusetion in terms of energy, which is better suited for the math in this question, rather than momentum. Now we all know that more speed = more kinetic energy, and change in kinetic energy = WORK. and work = F*d. Now it becomes easy to envision why it's better to floor that accelerator while going fast rather than while going slow. Or, to put it more accurately, at the peak of gravity's helping you rather than at the peak of gravity's hindering you. For the SAME AMOUNT OF TIME spent flooring the pedal (e.g., 1 second), in one situation you get to apply that force across a greater distance because gravity has already helped you attain a nice speed to get a lot of F*DISTANCE per F*TIME, whereas in the other situation you only apply that force for a lesser distance as gravity has worked against you and reduced your gains for a given impulse.
PLEASE RESPOND; PHYSICS NERD DISCUSSIONS ARE HIGHLY ENCOURAGED.
