My hat is off and held humbly in my hands for the subculture of drivers who hypermile. I am something of what you might call an aggressive driver. The fast lane is meant as a pipeline for cars to shoot down at 90 mph past slower drivers who apparently have less to do or fish a lot. Those who don’t observe fast lane rules get a good shot of me in their rear-view mirror, vomiting profanity, my front fender mere inches from their rear bumpers.

This kind of driving calls for a lot of accelerating and decelerating, so I consume gas like I used to mash troves of Slim Jims I’d find hidden behind the good silver into my piehole back when I was a fat kid. Hypermilers are pretty much the exact opposite of me.

Hypermiling is simply a set of driving techniques that aim to cut down fuel consumption, as much for environmental reasons as to stick it to the oil companies and save money. There are pretty much two main tenets of hypermiling: slow down and use cruise control.

Stop lights provide us with our two biggest opportunities to waste gas. Braking suddenly at red lights and accelerating rapidly when the light turns green. The former uses a whole lot of gas unnecessarily to get to a red light; the latter uses a lot of gas to get a few yards further a few seconds faster.

Letting your car handle the accelerating on the highway is apparently a good choice too. The car’s cruise control is designed to accelerate to maintain your chosen speed in the most efficient way, it’s a lot more efficient than your current brake-gas-brake method. So much so, Edmunds.com managed to squeeze an extra 35.4 percent more gas mileage out of a Land Rover using just the cruise control.

I’m not saying I’m going to be trying this anytime soon; I’m way too impatient. I just think it’s nice there are people out there who do drive like this. So long as they stay out of the fast lane.

More on HowStuffWorks.com:
What is hypermiling?
Can a car get 100 miles per gallon?
How EPA Fuel Economy Testing Works