Does a truck work extra to trail a car?
In my earlier post about hypermiling, I referred to drafting a truck as “a bit of a hack”:
You’re just trading your own carbon emissions for the truck’s really.
My brother said this probably isn’t true, since the vacuum would be there anyway. So I asked Metafilter.
The consensus seems to be that, no, it’s not a zero-sum one-for-one tradeoff. In fact, a properly proportioned train of cars behind the truck would improve its profile and reduce its slipstream. But it’s not entirely clear whether the car’s presence actually benefits the truck. With the new shit that’s come to light, it sounds to me like it does.
