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No, because an engine can use different amounts of fuel even at the same RPM. At the most extreme, a car can go downhill at high RPM with no fuel injection at all, only driven by gravity.
During normal driving, the engine’s crankshaft has a hard link to the wheels. It’s going through a couple of gears etc. inside the transmission etc., but the speed conversion from that is fixed within a single gear. This means that the speed the vehicle is going is directly tied to the RPM the engine is turning at. For every gear, every possible vehicle speed correlates directly to a single specific RPM of the engine. Fuel use at that RPM can vary a lot though, entirely depending on the amount of energy needed to keep the engine at that speed with air resistance and other factors trying to slow the car down through the drivetrain.
I am following your reasoning here. The thing that tripped me up was the last sentence of your previous comment. I understood it like it’s not necessary to switch gears since the load has no real effect on the force needed to move the car. You probably meant that the engine could handle the extra load while staying in the same gear and still use more fuel.
Ah, yeah, that’s what I meant. I just assumed that at highway speeds, the additional drag in this scenario probably wouldn’t be enough to warrant shifting down. Although to be fair depending on the engine it totally might, that was just a quick generalization on my part
No, because an engine can use different amounts of fuel even at the same RPM. At the most extreme, a car can go downhill at high RPM with no fuel injection at all, only driven by gravity.
During normal driving, the engine’s crankshaft has a hard link to the wheels. It’s going through a couple of gears etc. inside the transmission etc., but the speed conversion from that is fixed within a single gear. This means that the speed the vehicle is going is directly tied to the RPM the engine is turning at. For every gear, every possible vehicle speed correlates directly to a single specific RPM of the engine. Fuel use at that RPM can vary a lot though, entirely depending on the amount of energy needed to keep the engine at that speed with air resistance and other factors trying to slow the car down through the drivetrain.
I am following your reasoning here. The thing that tripped me up was the last sentence of your previous comment. I understood it like it’s not necessary to switch gears since the load has no real effect on the force needed to move the car. You probably meant that the engine could handle the extra load while staying in the same gear and still use more fuel.
I think we are on the same page now
Ah, yeah, that’s what I meant. I just assumed that at highway speeds, the additional drag in this scenario probably wouldn’t be enough to warrant shifting down. Although to be fair depending on the engine it totally might, that was just a quick generalization on my part