The Wizard of Odd

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

By Benjamin R. Bombard

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Moments after Conor Miller and I shake hands in the driveway of his place in East Jackson, he whips out his “cheat sheet,” and I feel like we’re breaking the rules.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Miller’s strange black vehicle – the reason for my visit – but he has my focus turned to a rudimentary graph on the cheat sheet that measures something called the “coefficient of drag” versus “streamlining,” which is more or less Greek to me.

An icon of your standard flatbed American truck sits somewhere in the middle of that sloping line, below a vintage sedan and above a modern one. Miller has altered the truck’s shape with a blue pen to make it look more like a door wedge on wheels than the arrow-with-a-tip-clipped-off silhouette that most flatbed trucks fit. When I glance up from the page for the first time, I see that Miller’s truck nearly mirrors the door-wedge-like truck on the cheat sheet.

As I’ll later learn, the modifications Miller has made to his 2004 Ford Ranger and the door-wedge shape he’s trying to sculpt it into are common practices among ecomodders. Ecomodders are a subculture of enviro-conscious, penny-pinching, borderline-OCD gearheads who trick out their cars to eke ever more miles per gallon out of them. The modifications they make are often small but significant, and when those mods are combined with “hypermiling” driving techniques, the resulting improvements in miles per gallon can be astonishing.

Before reducing his truck’s aerodynamic drag and driving with miles per gallon first on his mind, Miller’s two-wheel drive Ford Ranger was estimated by the EPA to get, at best, 27 miles per gallon on the highway. After the modifications, he has managed to squeeze 46 highway miles out of a single gallon of gasoline, breaking the unstated rules of how efficient consumer vehicles can be.

In plain English
The point of ecomodding is to make a vehicle as aerodynamically sleek and efficient as possible, especially on the highway. As your Subaru wagon hurtles down Highway 89 towards Alpine, your front-end bumps the air in front of you up over the car to the rear, where an eddy exerts a force opposite to your direction. In other words, the car creates drag that sucks it backwards and makes it less efficient. In fact, approximately 60 percent of the power produced by your car’s engine at highway speeds is used to overcome air drag, and that number only increases with speed. Drag is a non-issue at speeds below about 55 miles per hour, but it is compounded the faster you drive over that speed.

The amount of drag a vehicle creates is called its drag coefficient, which the graph on Miller’s cheat sheet uses to rank various vehicles. When the drag coefficient is calculated against the vehicle’s frontal area (measured in square feet), you get a number representing its drag area, which ecomodders attempt to diminish with as much zeal as runners hacking off milliseconds from their mile splits.
Miller explains this much to me as he points out all the superficial modifications he’s made to his truck, which he has nicknamed “Odd.” With every little modification comes a little boost in MPG.

He has partially covered the truck’s front grill (plus 1 to 2 MPG) and obscured about a third of the wheel wells with clear plastic sheeting and black Choroplast (plus 2 MPG), the same material used for most political candidate’s lawn signs. Using black Gorilla Tape, he has taped up any open seams on the front of the car (plus 1 MPG), such as around the headlights. A “partial belly pan” (plus 2 MPG) made of Choroplast covers the front half of the truck’s undercarriage.

Anything that obstructs the steady, even flow of air over any part of the vehicle has to be rectified to improve Odd’s aerodynamic efficiency and increase MPG. That even means that Miller folds the side-view mirrors in (plus 1 MPG) and has mounted a dagger-like shard of mirror on the truck’s dash in their place. Odd previously had no hubcaps, just MPG-sucking craters at its wheels’ centers. So Miller special ordered Bonneville Salt Flats moon style hubcaps that boosted his MPG a couple miles before some jerk made off with the driver’s side ones. In their place, Miller intends to use pizza pans.

The most aerodynamically dirty part of any vehicle is the rear end. As Miller pointed out on his cheat sheet, the rear end accounts for a third of the total effect of drag, and making it more streamlined and thus aerodynamic is a big way to boost MPG.
Odd’s most obvious and eccentric modification is the clear plastic casing that slopes over the truck’s bed.

Called an aerocap, the casing is made from polycarbonate, the same plastic used to make bullet-proof glass and Nalgene bottles, and it’s structured with steel girders and wooden beams. Like the blue line on the cheat sheet’s truck, the aerocap slopes back from the top of the back of the cab at a 12-degree angle. Miller explained that 12 degrees is the optimal slope to usher rushing air over the vehicle and send it sliding off the back, thus mitigating the air eddy in its slipstream and minimizing drag. The result: an extra two to three miles per gallon.

All the modifications Miller has made cost him approximately $600 and represent low fruit on the tree of MPG improvement. Added up, they’ve boosted his MPG by almost 60 percent (that is, before the hubcap thieves struck), all but negating the deleterious effects of drag. By his calculations, Miller figures he could go about 782 miles on a single tank of gas and that all the mods he has made should pay for themselves after 40 tanks of gas, give or take a few.

There are dozens upon dozens of additional modifications Miller could make to further improve his MPG, including technically complicated tinkerings under the hood. He has already built the basic structure of a Kammback or boat-tail that will extend the slope of the aerocap back another five feet to further diminish Odd’s drag.

Miller has some additional modifications in mind for Odd in the future, including an engine kill-switch, removing the air conditioning unit, installing a block heater and replacing his oil with high-viscosity synthetic oil. His unscientific guess is that the full bevy of mods could push Odd’s MPG up into the mid-60s.

Tweak the driver
Miller studied English Literature at Colorado College, and his tech/science savvy is on par with your average liberal arts major. Most of what he’s learned about automotive aerodynamics and ecomodding he either picked up in a class about electric car conversion he took in Seattle last spring, or it’s stuff he learned from the website Ecomodder.com. None of what he’s doing is that experimental – it’s all been tried and tested by other ecomodders and the results vary from vehicle to vehicle.

Ecomodding is only part of the MPG-improvement equation. As ecomodders are fond of saying, the biggest change you can make to boost MPG is to “adjust the nut behind the wheel.” In other words, tweak the driver and his or her driving style. If you’re at all interested in improving your MPG but don’t want to deck out your Forester in corrugated plastic, hypermiling might be your game.

One of the easiest hypermiling tips to improve gas mileage, especially in a physical activity wonderland like Jackson Hole, is to remove roof and bike racks.

Other common hypermiling techniques are to accelerate slowly and consistently, avoid braking whenever possible and do lots of coasting. Hypermilers have elevated coasting to an art form, the automotive equivalent of a manual in skateboarding.
Hypermilers measure the fruits of their labor either with a ScanGauge – a kind of MPG scoreboard – or with simple calculations of miles driven divided by gallons of gas consumed. Miller has kept a detailed fuel log ever since he got into hypermiling, and he’s watched his MPG edge up with every new modification.

“It’s all about energy efficiency,” he said. “How far can you go on the least amount of energy and dirt-bagging and making it as cheap as possible.”

Miller also believes that his current obsession with hypermiling isn’t that out of the ordinary for Jackson Hole. “A lot of people out here are obsessive compulsive,” he said. “Whether it’s climbing or skiing. People just get obsessed about shit out here.” Miller also thinks that given the transitory nature of Jacksonites, many of whom travel hundreds of miles a year on roadtrips or to relocate to other parts of the country, hypermiling just makes sense here and more people should get into it.

From a certain angle, hypermiling and ecomodding can look like the obsessions of penny-pinching misers. According to Miller, sure, hypermiling is a stingy way to save money on gasoline, but it’s also much more than that. For them, it’s a practice in keeping with their environmental concerns about CO2 emissions and global warming. It’s also a daily challenge and a lifestyle as much as many outdoor pursuits. For Miller, the excitement he gets from steadily increasing his MPG is on par with the rush of skiing a sick couloir.

Tailgaters will have to wait
Without question, Odd is one of the most singular vehicles around Jackson Hole and Miller has gotten used to rubberneckers staring at his truck. From his vantage point inside Odd, it’s the guys driving big trucks that are most baffled by the aerocap and other mods he’s made. “The bigger the truck, the more they stare,” Miller said.

He’s not the least bit self-conscious about Odd’s strange appearance and neither is his girlfriend – though she does wish the truck weren’t plastered with so much black tape.

“I think most people think it’s cool,” Miller said before adding that only a few people have ever asked him what all the streamlining modifications are about. As a friend of Miller’s pointed out, Odd’s oddness is more or less spelled out on a DIY bumper sticker tacked onto its rear.

On the left side of the bumper, written in black Sharpie on yellow duct tape is this simple request to tailgating drivers: “Get off my ass. I’m coasting!” And on the other side, waiting to be replaced with a “46,” is this explanation: “38 MPG.” JHW

Courtesy photo
Conor Miller and his vehicle

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The Wizard of Odd | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories

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