This way you can have the information right at your fingertips before you hop into your car to go and fuel up at the gas pump.

First, let’s look at ways you can obtain better miles per gallon or, for folks in Europe or Australia, use less litres/Km. You use strategies to improve your fuel consumption, and the higher MPG you get then takes care of everything else, like saving petrol or gasoline.

Some petrol-saving tricks can be as simple as car pooling or taking your vehicle in for a lube and a tune-up. Or you may have to re-learn your driving skills so as not to be a “lead foot”. (A person who accelerates too heavily and has to brake hard as well.) Apart from being antisocial and probably illegal, this kind of aggressive stop-start driving wastes fuel.

Other ways to save gas money can be more radical, such as modifying your car’s air intake or carburetor, maybe changing the engine or even exchanging your present car or truck for a hybrid, an electric vehicle or a smaller, more fuel-efficient automobile.

Alternatives to the Motor Car

And for city dwellers with short commuting distances, there are even more alternatives. These include motorcycles, motor scooters and even super-economical mopeds (pedal-assisted bicycles with small built-in motors). These have been popular in Europe and Mediterranean countries for several decades. But that’s an important point… Two-wheeled vehicles are not well-suited to cold weather driving. And wet-weather riding on a bike or scooter is no fun either.

The recent high cost of oil was caused in part by global warming and greenhouse gas emissions (such as carbon monoxide). Therefore, any methods we can come up with to improve your fuel efficiency will also reduce pollution (which is good for the world) and cut your gas bill (which is good for you, personally).

It may also be good for our balance-of-payments figures, and for our struggling national economy.

With fuel prices around the world leaping up and down like the stock markets, anything we can do to burn up less fuel is good for our pocketbook, is good for our country, our children and their childrens’ children.

Think of the environment, as well.

However, we also need to be sure that these fixes and adjustments to our lifestyle does not create new problems we hadn’t thought about. We need to be saving the environment rather than destroying it.

In modern-day Viet Nam, as an example, and many other Asian countries they cope with their traffic problems by having millions of people getting around on small motorcycles and motor scooters.

This gets folks around economically on their many small congested roads, but the two-stroke engines of those little motor-bikes has also created a major pollution problem because 2-stroke engines burn a mix of lubricating oil with their gasoline. They are terribly smoky.

So each of us will have to weigh the pros and cons most carefully before we decide how to improve gas mileage for ourselves.