Trip routing for vanlife

From a Reddit discussion. It started with a question:

What is more fuel efficient in the end, for example, driving a distance of 100km/miles on the highway or 75km/miles on land roads? With a normal car it’s more efficient to drive the highway most of the time, but with a bulky van?

Then led to some interesting answers:

As to speed … it’s all about the fuel being used to move the air. The force needed is proportional to V2 so slower the better within reason and expect increasingly worse consumption for smaller and smaller speed increases

Eg it takes 44% more force to drive at 60mph compared to 50mph (36/25=1.44)

And:

OK, after some more research on rv’s, which are pretty similar, the ideal speed seems to be 55mph/90km/h

So I guess it really depends on how often you need to break on land roads vs how much longer a highway is in milage/km. I think it kind of evens out eventually, and the land roads are more fun…

Butttt, I can’t seem to find a route app for this kind of thing.. With Google maps you have 2 choices: 99% highway, or trudging trough 100+ quaint little villages with a 100 stopsigns each.. Isn’t there a middle way?

I don’t want to have to waste an hour planning every trip in minute detail, so is there an app that let’s you choose the most fuel efficient way, or at least an ability to mostly avoid highway, but still keeping up a decent speed instead of doing 10mph for half of the time..

Of course, efficiency is just a part of the problem. Secondary roads are often some of the most delightful. Though there isn’t a vanlife-specific trip routing app, one trick I know is turning on the “avoid highways” switch in Apple Maps.

The “avoid highways” route turns an eight hour trip from San Francisco to Las Vegas into a 13.5 hour adventure through the Central and Death Valley. Almost certainly, however, the trip would take far longer with stops along the way.

Top image credit: oxana v.