Daily Driving A Hybrid Has Entirely Changed How I Drive

My daughter pleaded with me this morning to drive faster so we could get to her craft camp, which was a bit of a surprise. Not that she wanted to get to her crafting expediently. She loves to craft. I was startled that she wanted me to go faster. It’s generally been understood in this family that I always drive like Whataburger is going to close in five minutes.

Not anymore. It’s only taken me a few weeks, but my obsession with getting somewhere in the least amount of time has been replaced with a neverending quest to get there with the most efficiency, as determined by the MPGometer in the dash.

It’s not that I’m driving much slower. In fact, the startling reality is that I tend to arrive at my destinations in roughly the same amount of time when I was lead-footing it. How I get there is what’s changed and I think it’s made me a better and safer driver.

The Tyranny Of The Gauge

As many of you know, I was quite displeased with my Subaru Forester and chucked it for a Honda CR-V Hybrid last month. After driving a bunch of different cars for a year in search of my ideal next ride, I was quite certain I wanted a hybrid and the CR-V ticked most of the boxes. My heart is still in the Ford Maverick and maybe one day I’ll pick up a cheap used one, but for now, my 2024 Honda CR-V Hybrid Sport AWD has worked out quite well.

One feature of the Forester I didn’t even think about until I got rid of it was the “trip-meter” in the small multifunction display on the top of the dash. I’m always curious about my fuel mileage (often terrible) and learned quickly that the only thing I could regularly do to get better fuel economy was to get on the highway, which doesn’t make much sense when getting around outside New York City.

Right next to the fuel economy gauge was a little timer with E/T written above it, which stood for elapsed time. Most cars have this and I’m not sure if it was the prominent placement or just something in my brain is now forever wired to try and make screens happy, but I quickly started logging every trip in my head so I could improve my “score.”

A trip to the grocery store should take 11 minutes. The gym should be 17 minutes. The morning trip to school, on a good day, is a 12-minute journey, a great day is when it only takes 9 minutes, and anything over 14 minutes is a failure. The school trip really took over my mornings.

I’m definitely the kind of person who notes every stoplight and tries to find the ideal traffic pattern, which led me to realize that if I could get on a specific stretch of road in one of the first two cars and speed a little bit I could catch the second traffic light. If that didn’t work, I could always slam the car into the left turn lane and be one of the first four people in line at the turn signal and go the back way around the hospital.

There was a week when one of the lights was switched to a blinking red because of construction and I was ecstatic because I hit the holy grail of a six-minute trip to school. In doing so I also drove a little faster than I needed to, ran yellows, and otherwise drove more aggressively than I probably should in my neighborhood. I’m sure if I just drove like a normal person I’d have made it in seven minutes.

I literally found myself getting angry as the clock started to tick over ten as I’d “failed” that morning. It was a bad way to be.

The Happy Gauge

With the purchase of my CR-V Hybrid I quickly noticed a new quest had entered into my field of view. An MPGometer. Specifically, it tells me how much fuel economy I’ve achieved for the life of the specific trip meter. There were a few delivery miles on my CR-V and those were not very efficient because it was mostly being trucked around.

I quickly reset “A” and made that my main tracker of fuel economy.

Quite quickly I was up into the 38.X range.

As you can see, the CR-V should be getting a stout 37 MPG, which is a vast improvement over the 27 MPG I was supposed to get in the Forester (I got nowhere close, I probably averaged around 24 mpg). My goal quickly became clear: I need to get the CR-V Hybrid to 40.0 MPG on average.

This is one of those challenges that theoretically becomes harder over time as every mile adds to the denominator. Also, the EPA claims it doesn’t perform as well on the highway over longer distances so a road trip might throw this off a bit, though so far I haven’t seen it drop too low.

To my surprise, it’s been way easier and more fun to try and squeeze an extra decimal point of MPG out of the CR-V. That’s what people talk about at race tracks when they talk about “finding a few tenths” right?

How I’m Driving Differently

As previously discussed, the Honda CR-V Hybrid operates slightly differently than some other mass-market hybrids like the Ford Escape HEV or Toyota RAV4 HEV. Those systems generally use a planetary gearset to switch between one of two motor-generators and the gas engine. Honda, instead, uses one powerful motor for driving the wheels directly and the gas engine either as a generator or a combo. Instead of a planetary gear, there are two clutches (one high and one low). The above chart from the user manual explains the modes fairly well.

My CR-V is AWD, but instead of a small electric motor in the rear, as you’d find on many hybrids, there’s a real mechanical linkage and no rear motor (I suspect this will make the car perform better in the snow than a comparable Toyota hybrid and will test it once it gets colder). Because of this, there’s an “ECO” mode, but no “EV Only” mode.

This means that driving efficiently is all about maximizing your time in “EV” mode, which is shown clearly on the dash where a tachometer would normally go. I have a few strategies that seem to work.

You Gotta Learn To Sail

I cannot expertly sail a boat. I’ve helped my friends on their sailboats before and I understand the basic rules, which in no way qualifies me to sail anything larger than a small dinghy (and even then). I can sail a car, though.

What I mean is I can get a car up to speed and find the point of minimal throttle input to convince the CR-V’s computer that it can maintain forward momentum using only the electric motor. If you’re too heavy on the skinny pedal the car will assume you want more juice and kick on the engine, either to act as a generator or, at speeds above 45 mph, to propel the car. I’ve done this for miles on highways.

I call this “sailing” and it’s fun in its own nerdy way. Even though the car doesn’t have a manual, it keeps me engaged in the driving process. This seems like a good strategy as the car does the same thing when it’s in cruise control, though not as expertly.

You Gotta See The Road

If you go to a high-performance driving school one of the first things they’ll teach you is to look down the racetrack. If your eyes are right in front of you there’s no way you’ll be able to set the car up for this corner, let alone the corner behind it.

When trying to hypermile the CR-V I’m doing the same. As smart as my CR-V is, it can’t interpret the road ahead, it doesn’t know the light is about to turn red because the walk signal is counting down to zero. It doesn’t sense a long slow dip in the pavement which means I can coast a lot further.

Some of the most efficient driving I’ve gotten out of the CR-V has been coming home from the gym, which usually involves some interstate traffic that keeps me in the ideal 40-50 mph range where efficiency seems to peak. Additionally, I’ve come to learn that my gym is ever so slightly uphill from my home, so I can coast for long periods of time on the barely perceptible slope.

I now have a way better sense of what is uphill and downhill from where I live, though living near the coast means that almost everything is uphill from here.

The CR-V’s Paddles Are For Performance

I’ll be honest, I almost never use the flappy paddles on a performance car if I’m not on a race track. I might reach for them if I see a quick pass coming while I’m on the highway or a rural road, but they’re mostly vestigial for me and, I assume, most people.

The paddles in the CR-V have a more helpful mission, similar to what you’ll find on a lot of electric cars these days. Instead of shifting gears (there is no real transmission to speak of and the ratios for the lock-up clutches are too broad to be useful), the paddles are used to increase or decrease regenerative braking.

On most electric cars, this is a set-it-and-forget-it feature. You set the regen braking you want and you’re good. On the CR-V Hybrid, it’s an active part of driving if you’re interested in saving more fuel. As you begin to slow down in traffic or come to a turn you can actively depress the paddle up to four times to get ever-increasing levels of regeneration.

Even better, in most situations pressing that button will signal to the car that it should slip into EV mode as it begins to decelerate. If you give it enough time or you’re on a slight incline the strongest level will slow the car down entirely, though it’s not quite enough for true one-pedal driving in most situations.

If you find yourself slowing too quickly for traffic you can quickly cancel it by accelerating or, better, by using the right paddle shifter to reduce some of the mechanical drag.

I Am Driving Near The Speed Limit More Often

I still generally go with the “flow of traffic” because I live in the Tri-State area and don’t want to get flattened by an idiot in a Suburban. I also will choose the shortest distance when I pull up a journey on Google Maps because, as much as I enjoy doing this, I’m not going to spend 15 minutes doing this unnecessarily.

This is extremely obvious, but driving closer to the speed limit more often is one of the easiest and most impactful ways to save on fuel. Because I suddenly care more about fuel mileage than I do about raw speed I’ve found myself hovering around posted speeds with a frequency that was not as common before.

As I mentioned above, this seems to cost me very little time overall.

It’s Working!

In driving my daughter to school I briefly dropped to 38.9, but only briefly. I had to get on the highway and there’s a quick merge that requires getting up to speed over too short a distance. I was prepared for it, mentally, so it didn’t bother me. I just coasted at the speed limit for the 1.5 miles to the exit and was back to 39.0 mpg in no time.

For all the effort I put into this, I share the CR-V Hybrid with a wife who is generally disinterested in changing her driving habits to make a few pixels on an LCD change and she seems to do just fine when it comes to economy. While I was gone for a week she took a long trip down the coast on roads that kept her at an ideal speed for the CR-V and was the first person to touch the 39.X range.

As the days get shorter and the weather turns colder I suspect my lighter use of the A/C might result in even better fuel economy as I reach for the mythical 40.0 MPG number.