Think about the ad's target demographic - people who think that the iPhone is the only way to access the internet or listen to music from your phone. The target demo has no concept of the state of technology, but want to try to be on the curring edge. So it's not suprising that the ad glosses over all the technical details.

This iPhone ad, like all the other iPhone ads, are pretty devious. Because it's not Apple making the claims, it's the users making the claims, Apple can deny culpability in false advertising. Take the ad with the dancer (or is it the director) who says that no other phone than the iPhone can let them blog or e-mail live. Totally false, yet Apple can say that they didn't claim that while still basically saying it in an ad.

Apple has a history of deceitful advertising, from "I saved Christmas because I didn't have to download a driver like you would have to do with Windows." to the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads to the current iPhone ads. The worst in my opinion wasn't necessarily deceitful but definitely creepy was the "Think Different" campaign showing all these luminaries like Eistein, Feynman, John Lennon - all people who were dead and in the public sphere so you could use their image. Something tells me that John Lennon probably wouldn't have hawked for Apple had he been alive.

While most of the advice here is great - particularly the stay out of the fast lane advice - 2 items are horrible advice, particularly in crowded areas.

Granted, the big buffer zone is my pet peeve. This essentially means less cars can fit in a given stretch of freeway. This means that traffic jams back up further. What then happens is one bottleneck or accident backs traffic up to the previous bottleneck.

Suppose there is a bottleneck at x=0 miles and one at x=2 miles (traffic moving in the negative x-direction). If the backup with "normal" buffer zones is 1 mile, the bottleneck at x=0 only backs up to x=1. If the backup with a bigger buffer zone is 3 miles, then traffic from the bottleneck at x=0 is backed up not from x=1, but something greater than x=3 since there's another bottleneck at x=2. Then the traffic backed up from the bottle neck at x=2 is not backed up to x=3, but something even greater than x=5 since a portion of the traffic from the x=0 bottleneck hasn't made it through the x=2 bottleneck. So two relatively short backups are now one massive backup due to a bigger buffer zone. And now all those people are either idling or moving at 0-15mph which is not fast enough to get into top gear where you get better fuel economy.

The statement that it takes a lot of energy to slow down a car moving fast is true, but irrelevant. Braking more gradually means that your average speed is lower and so is your wind resistance. The energy used to slow the car down does not come from gasoline, but from your foot pressing on the brake pedal and being dissipated as heat at the brake rotors and/or brake drums.

A gradual slowdown would help if you put the car in neutral each time, but if you don't as soon as you or the transmission shifts out of high gear, your gas mileage will go down.

The 3 biggest things you can do for better gas mileage is to accelerate slowly, cruise at lower speeds, and shift into the highest gear ASAP. But these first two things are VERY dangerous if you don't pay attention to traffic around you. So please don't go pulling into the carpool lane in front of me at 10 mph when I'm going 70 mph. (This has happened to me twice in the span of 3 days and only a wide shoulder saved our lives).

kickstart - I finally upgraded my Chevelle from 4-wheel manual drum brakes to power front disk brakes, and for a while had the original bias-ply spare on one of the wheels. It was a crap shoot as to if I would be able to stop in time, so I kept a much larger distance between me and the car in front of me. (Though I didn't slow down as a whole)

Also, other people on the road weren't sure I was going to be able to stop. When I drive it people don't stop, look right at me, and then pull out right in front of me like they do when driving the Taurus.

Aycharaych - Great point that the horsepower number is misleading. Though I would quibble a bit.

There's the old saying with gasoline engines that there's no replacement for displacement. The smaller the engine, the less torque it produces at low rpm. In order to get equivalent torque at the wheels, the smaller engine needs to get to higher rpm and use higher gear ratios as compared to a larger engine.

Since a turbocharger's boost is negligible at low rpm (hence turbo lag) a turbo on an engine with little low-end torque doesn't address the low-rpm lack of torque. It is great for increasing top-end horsepower so it's a great match for diesel engines which generally (if not inherently) have gobs of low-end torque. For smaller engines with little low-end torque, a supercharger (belt-driven compressor) is better, but not as good as a turbo at high rpm.

I'm very interested in seeing the gas mileage on the displacement-on-demand systems from GM. Low-end torque when needed and then low displacement at cruise and idle.

Of course the ultimate in low-end torque is a 3-phase AC motor (maximum torque from 0-several thousand rpm).

What would be even more interesting is how well the cell-phone yappers changed lanes. I suspect complete obliviousness to other vehicles, lack of signaling, excessively slow lane changes (which helps to block 2 lanes instrad of just one), and failure to look over the shoulder to check blind spots.