Drive a little smoother and you can save twice — at the pump and, for eligible drivers, on your Novo rate.
TL;DR — Short answer: the quickest way to use less gas is to drive smoothly. Accelerate gently, coast to stops, hold a steady speed, cut idling, drop extra weight, and keep your tires inflated. Here’s the bonus: how smoothly you drive is something insurers can actually measure now, and some of them, Novo included, give safer drivers a better rate for it. So those same easy habits can pay you back twice, once at the pump and, if you’re an eligible Novo driver, once on your car insurance.*
Gas is sitting around $3.80 a gallon, and no amount of glaring at the pump is going to talk it down. Good news: a big chunk of what you spend on fuel isn’t decided by the number on the sign. It’s decided by your right foot.
The car you drive sets a ceiling on your mileage, but the way you drive decides how close you actually get to it. And there’s a bonus most articles on how to save gas skip right over: the same calm habits that stretch a tank happen to be the exact ones an insurer like Novo, which prices you on how you actually drive, pays attention to. Drive a little smoother and you can come out ahead twice, once at the pump and once on your rate. We’ll get to that second part.
Launching off every green light like it’s a starting grid feels great for about four seconds. Then it just costs you.
The U.S. Department of Energy says aggressive driving, all those quick starts and hard stops and bursts of speed, can drop your gas mileage by 15% to 30% at highway speeds and by 10% to 40% in stop-and-go traffic. Over a month of commuting, that’s real money vanishing out of the tailpipe. Pretend there’s a full cup of coffee balanced on the dash and accelerate like you don’t want to wear it.
That red light ahead isn’t turning green for you. So there’s not much point flooring it up to the line only to stand on the brakes.
Every time you race to a stop and brake hard, you burn fuel building up speed you’re about to throw away, then burn more getting moving again. Look a few cars ahead, read what traffic’s doing, and let the car roll down on its own. You’ll use less gas and go through brake pads a lot slower. The only one who loses is the gas station.
Speed feels free. It really isn’t.
Mileage tends to fall off a cliff once you’re past 50 mph, and the Department of Energy figures that every 5 mph over 50 is about like paying an extra 27 cents a gallon. Stretch that across a full road trip and you’ve basically bought yourself a premium coffee in exchange for showing up a few minutes earlier. On the highway, let cruise control keep you honest. It won’t quietly drift up to 80 the way your foot will.
A parked, running engine gets you zero miles per gallon. Hard to beat that for a bad deal.
Idling burns through a quarter to a half gallon of gas an hour depending on your engine and whether the AC’s cranking, per the DOE, and firing a modern car back up only costs you around ten seconds’ worth of fuel. So if you’re going to sit for more than a minute, waiting on a text, parked in the school pickup line, killing time in a lot, just turn it off.
Your trunk is not a storage unit, even if lately it’s been doing a convincing impression of one.
Lugging extra weight around chips away at your mileage, roughly 1% for every 100 pounds, according to the DOE. And that cargo box up on the roof is sneakier than it looks. Fighting the wind, the DOE estimates it can knock 6% to 17% off your highway fuel economy. Pull it off once the trip’s done, and haul in the stuff that’s been riding around in your back seat since last month.
Least exciting fuel-saving tip on the list. Also one of the easiest to actually pull off.
Tires that are low on air make the engine drag harder for every mile. Keep them at the pressure your manufacturer recommends and you can pick up as much as 3% better mileage, says fueleconomy.gov. The right number lives on a sticker inside the driver’s door. Check it once a month, add a little air, move on with your life.
Look back at that list. Smoother acceleration, softer braking, a steadier speed. Those aren’t just fuel-saving habits. They’re the same behaviors that tell an insurer you’re a safer bet behind the wheel. So if you’ve been wondering how to use less gas without trading in your car, you’re already looking at the answer.
And this next bit comes from the government, not our marketing department. The DOE found that drivers who use a feedback device to keep an eye on their habits improve their fuel economy by about 3% on average, and by roughly 10% once they really commit to it. Turns out that when you can actually see how you’re driving, you drive better and burn less.
A Novo Safety Score works on that same idea. Novo builds your price around how you actually drive, and the score is based on three things: acceleration, braking, and speeding. The very habits that were quietly draining your tank. Clean them up for the fuel savings, and eligible drivers* may see it show up as a lower monthly rate too. How much depends on how you drive, so no two people land in the same spot.
It’s a different setup from insurance that leans mainly on factors like your ZIP code or age, which don’t say much about how carefully you take a left turn. With Novo, the more thought you put into your driving, the more it factors into your price.
Here’s the low-risk way to test all of this. Novo has a “drive first” option: download the app for free and just drive the way you normally do. You’ll see your Safety Score after your very first trip, and the app’s Driver Board shows your real-time score, your miles, and a trip report that shows you where your driving got a little aggressive, or, let’s be honest, a little spicy — genuinely useful whether you’re chasing fuel savings, a better Safety Score, or both. Once you’ve logged 5 trips and 50 miles you’ll get a personalized rate based on your own driving, no policy required to find out.
Don’t want to wait? You can get an instant quote at quote.novo.us without downloading the app. (Novo auto coverage is currently available in Arizona.)
So try the habits for a couple of weeks, watch the gas needle move, and let the app show you what your driving is actually worth.
Do them to spend less at the pump. Treat the better Safety Score as the bonus.
Download the Novo app and try “drive first” — drive as usual, then see a rate built around how you actually drive.
Keep saving on the road:
