HEART BEAT: Karmic Cruise Control

By Felicia Mitchell/Columnist

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I haven’t mentioned the little Sentra in a long time.  That’s because I wasn’t up to writing about its demise last year.  Right now, it’s in a scrap heap somewhere, being harvested like a good little donor. 
When the little Sentra left my life, I was already driving my husband’s car much of the time because I needed a bigger trunk to handle a wheelchair.  Driving the Maxima, I did miss the Sentra, but the sound system helped me to adjust to the change.
The Sentra fit me like a glove, though, and it averaged great gas mileage, about 39 MPG.  The Maxima doesn’t.  It’s the sort of car that makes you think twice about where you want to go and when.  I guess it was averaging about 27.7 when I decided to challenge it.  Sometimes competition is a good thing.
You know how some cars like the Prius have those fancy touch-screen monitors on their dashboards?  My husband’s new car is like that.  Well, I’ll tell you the truth.  It’s a Prius, my dream car, the sort of car I will buy when the Maxima joins the little Sentra in car heaven (after it dies, I hope, of old age and not some catastrophic ordeal). 
People who drive these hybrids study the feedback and use it to try to get even better mileage.  The interesting thing is that you can see MPG go up and down in a blink of the eye.  For example, one winter day, I turned the heater up while my husband was driving.  The MPG dropped by two miles per gallon. So I turned the heat back down.
B. F. Skinner, who pioneered a psychology based on stimulus-response conditioning, would have loved to live long enough to watch people watching MPG feedback.  He would have found us more interesting than rats.  At least me, anyway.  I am more interesting than a rat these days.
After watching my husband watch his monitor, which reminds me every time we go out just what the average MPG is for this tank of gas, a tank that will last a long time, I decided that it was time to challenge the Maxima to try harder.  While it might not be a hybrid, and it may not have a fancy screen on the dashboard, it does have an old-fashioned electronic gadget that can gauge MPG for each trip.
Hybrid envy helps.  So far, I’ve coaxed the Maxima up to 34.8 MPG on the highway.  Around town, it will go 28.  When I leave the house, though, and it’s warming up, it gets between 21 or 23 for a few miles. 
To help out, I’ve stopped using air conditioning and/or heat.  Evidently there’s a reason cars have windows.  There are other changes.  Instead of idling at a light, I put the car in neutral.  It’s not much, and I’ll never get the mileage a hybrid gets, but we’re having a good time.  The little Sentra would approve.
Felicia Mitchell teaches English at Emory & Henry College.