Haste Makes Waste

I've got a Prius. Many people would probably stereotype me on that issue, figuring I'm politically or environmentally a certain way. Some people that get high mileage cars are just cheap. They don't want to spend the money on gas.

For me, it was a little bit of all that, but mostly, it's the engineering of efficiency. How do you get more for less?

So I find myself doing this thing they call Hypermiling (Hyper Mile-ing). The readout on the dashboard tells you what your instantaneous and average gas mileage are. And one screen you can select shows the instantaneous power efficiency. You drive around and you quickly learn (or relearn, or have dramatically emphasized to you) that quick starts and rapid acceleration are wasteful. If you can take the time to slowly wind up to speed, you will use a lot less fuel. And once you are going, it doesn't take as much energy to keep going.

It occurred to me that you might be able to get more mileage from premium gas. I figured that the higher octane might be enough to get enough more energy and more mileage to more than justify the price. I started thinking about this after my mileage had been going down and I had the dealer flush the injectors and got an immediate 20% jump in gas mileage. So I put in some premium gas and got another 10% boost. However, I found this to be a false savings, because I started driving more carefully at the same time. I found that the first tank was about the time it took to drain my battery. The thing is, when you hypermile, you tend to make the car run in all electric mode more often. However, it's the boost in speed you get from fuelled acceleration that charges up the battery. So after you hypermile for a while, you drain the battery down to the point where the motor is always running just to charge the battery. So instead of sitting quietly at a stop light with the motor off, you sit there with your gas engine idling just like any non-hybrid car. So there is a limit to how much you can save.

It was about this time that I started obsessing about getting solar panels for the car. I thought that if the battery would just recharge while it was parked at work or home, that it would be full at least once a day and I could hypermile around for a while, draining it. I thought about a sunshade for the window out of solar panels or a carport to park it in that has solar panels. The next problem is converting that power to the right voltage and then feeding it in to the battery without harming the car's electronics. People out there have done it, but there's nothing readily available off the shelf.

It occurred to me that any time you're in a hurry to do something, it costs you.

I was thinking about energy first. If you want it quickly and need it now, it costs you in who you have to buy it from or what it does to the environment. If you take the time to do it right, it's more sustainable.

But it's not just energy that costs when you rush it. Look at what happens with wars. When you rush to war, use up resources at a fearsome rate. It's wasteful of lives as well as respect and prestige in the world.

There are other examples, as well. There's that song that says you can't hurry love, and that's probably true most of the time. When you are smitten with someone, you can't just rush up to them and shout "I'm in love with you!" and expect this to be taken as anything but proof that you are nuts and not worthy of love.

It's kind of that way in sales, too. You have to wait for the sales to come to you to really start making good consistent sales. You can't call someone up every day and say "are you going to buy something from me today?!" and expect them to continue to take your calls. After a while, they'll make a point of not buying from you because you annoy them. If you've ever been to a car dealer and had the guy come up to you and say "what's it going to take to get you to drive off in this today?!" you know that this is the quickest way to make you want to leave and never come back.

I think weight loss is another example of haste being counter productive. If you do manage to loose weight really quickly, you run the risk of injuring yourself if it's through exercise, or making yourself unhealthy if it's through diet. And there's the rebound effect. Lose weight quickly and you become so hungry (at least I do). You have to take the time to lower your appetite while you are loosing weight.

So just like the tortoise and the hare, remember, slow and steady wins the race.