Inflate Our Tires

When tires are not inflated to the recommended PSI (pounds per square inch) as recommended by tire manufacturers, the flat part in contact with the ground is greater and the tires require more energy to flex as they roll.  This phenomenon is known as rolling resistance.  Rolling resistance goes up as pressure goes down.   Low tire pressure reduces the efficiency of your car and shortens the life of your tires – a double penalty.

An informal study by students at Carnegie Mellon University found that the majority of cars on U.S. roads are operating on tires inflated to only 80 percent of capacity.   (One Dept. of Transportation study has it at 80% of all vehicles have under-inflated tires, 27% have tires under-inflated by 25% or more)  According to the website, fueleconomy.gov, inflating tires to their proper pressure can improve mileage by about 3.3 percent, whereas leaving them under-inflated can lower mileage by 0.4 percent for every one PSI drop in pressure of all four tires.

That may not sound like much, but it means that the average person who drives 12,000 miles yearly on under-inflated tires uses about 144 extra gallons of gas, at a cost of $300-$500  $576.00 a year.  And each time one of those gallons of gas is burned, 20 pounds of carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere as the carbons in the gas are released and combine with the oxygen in the air. As such, any vehicle running on soft tires is contributing as much as 1.5 extra tons (2,880 pounds) of greenhouse gases to the environment annually.

There are about 250 million vehicles on the road in the U.S.  Some are trucks, but trucks need to keep their tires inflated too.  The average distance driven in a year is 12,000 miles.  With 80% needing to inflate their tires – that makes 200 million of us driving on low tires, each adding an extra 1.5 tons of CO2 to the atmosphere.

200 million cars with under inflated tires x 144 gallons of gas per car per year = 28,800,000,000 gallons of gas.

28,800,000,000 gallons of gas divided by 19.6 gallons of gas per barrel of oil (U.S. Energy Information Agency) = 1,469,387,755 barrels of oil per year.

According to estimates from the Interior Dept.’s Minerals Management Service (MMS), the U.S. has roughly 18 billion undiscovered and technically recoverable bbl. of oil offshore.  Total.  It would take a decade to get the first barrel to flow and we could recover maybe 1 billion barrels per year.

In other words, if we inflate our tires to the proper pressure we would save just about the entire amount of oil available offshore before the first barrel was pumped.  Furthermore we save more oil per year than offshore drilling will product.  Period.  Offshore oil will flow at a rate less than what we can save by inflating our tires, and we have the additional benefit of not emitting 1.5 tons x 200 million cars x 10 years – 3 billion tons of CO2 in the interim.

Seems like inflating our tires is a smarter policy.

– from sustainabledesignupdate

This statistics are of US. But its valid for other countries too. Please check your vehicle’s air pressure once in 2 weeks.