How Should You Drive Down a Hill?

Driving across the country isn’t a venture that’s flat and straight. Even in the Midwest, where many people joke about the flat area of road for driving, there are hills that you could run into and have to figure out what you want to do for the drive. The question for the drive down a hill is whether or not you should leave the car in a higher gear and used the brakes to maintain a constant speed or you should move into neutral and allow the car to ride normally down the hill.

Of course, you would need to have a long ride down a hill or mountain in order to need to consider this choice at all. On normal roads that have a few hills you wouldn’t need to worry too much about engine braking or dealing with neutral for the drive. When you do have the long drive down a hill, you need to know which driving style will give you the best savings on fuel so that you can help make your drive as efficient as possible when you’re out on the road on a daily basis.

Which Way is the Best?

First of all, you need to have a vehicle that uses a manual transmission to be concerned by the difference between coasting and engine braking. This won’t be anything to worry about if you have a vehicle that uses an automatic transmission, but if you have a manual transmission vehicle, you’re going to want to know which way you should drive down a hill, especially if you spend a lot of time driving across the country in hilly and mountainous areas. The concern we want to have is fuel efficiency for this particular test.

The most efficient way to handle the drive down a hill is to let your foot off the gas and allow the fuel injectors to shut off while the engine is still running. This allows the gravity, inertia, and engine to carry you to the bottom of the hill without using much fuel at all. If you put the car in neutral, the fuel injectors have to keep the car idling and continue to inject fuel into the engine during this process, which causes you to consume fuel even if your foot is off the gas, making it the less efficient scenario.

There is a scenario when putting the car in neutral can help save you more fuel and is more likely what you’re going to face. If you travel down a hill and then up a hill on the other side you will find that your vehicle operates more efficiently by being in neutral. The reason for this is the fact that being in gear will cause your vehicle to slow down during the descent which will then require you to accelerate to get up the smaller hills on the other side. Figure out which way you want to drive so that you can have the most efficiency, based upon the hills that you’re going to drive.