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.
Matt, do you have B-mode on your shifter? That emphasizes regenerative braking and enables nearly one-foot driving. Whenever I drive my wife’s 2023 CR-V Sport, I’m in B-mode. You can’t use cruise control in B-mode, but I love watching that battery juice-up. It’s the little things…
I was influenced the very same way by my wife’s Highlander hybrid. Every time I drive it, I’m trying to improve on the average reported when I get in. I have quickly learned that she really doesn’t want to hear about my successes in this effort, though 🙂
I realized this morning that the behavior has even followed me back to my Cayman; if I’m just trying to manage in traffic, keeping an eye on the fuel economy tends to mellow my frustration at negotiating city traffic with a manual transmission car, and might just save me a ticket.
Are you… me?
I do the exact same thing. My wife drives it cold to work a whopping three miles (car wants to warm up the engine first, so less electrical work) and back. ct200h. It’s at 32mpg after a week of that when we go on a long highway trip and I keep it steady at 70mph and I can get it up to 40mpg, as long as we go downhill toward the ocean (we live at 1000′ elevation, and yes, it makes that much difference!).
However you are not me, because I take my Matrix XRS up to 80 and higher whenever I can do so safely. And accelerating to cruising speed as fast as possible, not inching up as I do in the Lexus. I think I would prefer a high performance Plug-in hybrid so I can fool myself into thinking I can do both, save gas and have fun while ignoring my higher electric bill.
To be clear, I don’t always drive the Cayman that way. Just leaving the neighborhood this morning after the night before where I’d been play Gran Turismo online with friends, I had to remind myself that going as fast as possible was not the morning’s mission 🙂
OMG, you are back to me again!
“However you are not me, because I take my Matrix XRS up to 80 and higher whenever I can do so safely.”
You know, you can get a lot better fuel economy by doing 55 or less… and then then relax while listening to music or an audio book.
Yawn. That is not what my car is for. I save that for my wife’s car.
“I have quickly learned that she really doesn’t want to hear about my successes in this effort, though”
You can tell me! And with my C-Max that I recently bought, I averaged 2.5L/100km… which is about 94mpg (US gallons)… and I went a little over 1800km on that tank.
And I expect to beat that on my current tank as I get to know the vehicle better.
I met a C-Max owner who claimed 200 mpg. How, I asked? On every trip beyond 20 miles, he drove his Explorer instead. I wasn’t impressed- that’s gaming the system. Buying any of these Green options, whether EV, PHEV or hybrid, won’t save fuel or emissions. That only comes from retiring your less efficient vehicle.
At 80,000 miles, my C-Max Energi’s lifetime MPG sits at 65mpg. It’s driven for short and long trips.
Well at least that person was using the C-Max for what it does best… Short trips. But yeah, that is gaming things.
I only have one vehicle… the C-Max. So the only way I’m gonna game the system is if I start riding my bicycle for longer trips… LOL
The key to great mileage on the C-max is to keep the speed down, brake gently to make the most out of regen and accelerate gently.
And for my daily commute, the EV range is enough to go to and from work if I take it easy.
But at least once a week, I drive at least 120km to see my GF… so that brings down my MPGs.
No big revelation here but something I’ve found helps with my non-hybrid non-economy car, is using the manual mode when using cruise control. My auto transmission (and others I’ve tried) are too eager to downshift at the slightest hill because they want to instantly maintain the speed. Setting gear 6 at any speed over 80kmh is usually fine for most little hills and undulations in the road that it would otherwise shift down and rev up for. A big pet peeve is a car slowing down 3 kph up the first half of the hill, then slamming the gas to accelerate up the top half of the hill.
I had a similar experience coming from a Veloster to my Niro, I thought man loosing my manual would make driving suck, but the quest for better mileage and such makes it sort of fun (not quite 6MT fun lol) but fun enough and engaging as you said. We get 50mpg+ on average!
If I were you, I would not admit to being the dipshit speeding everywhere in a slightly broken 2016 Subaru Forester because I value saving 45 seconds on my commute more highly than I value everybody’s safety and convenience.
“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”
For the record, this may or may not mean shit. All CRVs have a mechanical drive to the rear, but that doesn’t stop them from performing worse than comparable Toyota “AWD” systems. Typically it sends very little power to the rear, and only at VERY low speeds(like under 10mph). Making it objectively not full time AWD, making it literally not AWD. Which is why I call most transverse engine “AWD” systems “AWD”, emphasis on quotes, because calling it AWD is just a marketing lie.
This is why I find driving my 2000 Insight so engaging. You have to balance throttle input, with speed, with shifting gears, and how hard you’re flogging the hybrid battery. It requires you to look ahead and downshift before you hit an incline, because you won’t have enough torque to climb a hill in whatever you’re cruising in. And then, when conditions are right, the MPG skyrockets to 75-100mpg while traveling 55-65mph, or 50-75mpg at 80mph. It’s not a fast car, but it’s fun to drive because it requires so much concentration and thinking.
There was a while where I hadn’t driven manual in a long time because of the household sharing vehicles, and then we picked up a Prius and I felt engaged in a way I hadn’t in a long time for a car. Seeing the nerdy stats up on the dash and the car showing exactly where the threshold is for EV accel and regen braking hit that same part of my brain that feels good when feathering a clutch.
I get it. The Volt and then our 330e made me much a much more efficient driver. I can even hypermile the crap our of our truck now. Daily driving the 330e has not make the wife a more efficient driver though, since she can’t keep a constant speed for some reason, so it just bounces between acceleration and regen, which probably makes her a less efficient driver. I’ve told her tonjist use the cruise control at a minimum. But any advice I give on her driving is criticism so I usually don’t. But I’d say I get about 25 percent more electric range than she does.
same!
My father-in-law would do this pulse and glide routine. It was like he was pedaling the car down the road. On the same drive, in the same car, I got better mileage, 26mpg to 23.
I agree with your sentiment whole heartedly and pretty much experience something similar when I drove my wifes Fusion H ybrid. Part of the reason, I believe, for this sudden fascination with fuel economy is that the Fusion doesn’t like to be rushed along. It always feels like it does it begrudgingly. It’s not rewarding and there’s very few cars or gaps that I can beat in that car. Even the few times where I’m trying to act like an ass (for reasons…. I’m still driving in the nyc area. Sometimes it’s called for) the car looks at me and goes “yeahhhh nah”.
So I find myself trying to find the sweet spot between going where I need to at an acceptable speed and trying to max the economy at that speed. And because of that I also have to time my responses differently because I k ow I can’t be overly aggressive. I guess I’m better for it?
Dork! 😉
I’m glad you’re happy with the new rig. I know a couple people with these, and they seem to love them too.
I like watching efficiency more on surface roads then the highway. Highway it just means going slower, and nobody wants to add 15 minutes to a 1.5 hour drive to eak out some extra mpe. But, surface streets it’s all about being smooth, using regen instead of breaks, one foot driving, and finding the best route. It’s more engaging than a manual transmission (blasphemy I know) for the day-to-day stuff that is 99% of my driving.
“nobody wants to add 15 minutes to a 1.5 hour drive to eak out some extra mpe”
The OT proves differently.
“nobody wants to add 15 minutes to a 1.5 hour drive to eak out some extra mpe”
If 120 miles at 80mph is 1.5 hours, and at 70mpg is 1.72 hours – but I get 25 mpg vs 27 mpg at the slower speed, and as a bonus am on the brakes less, and less stressed out…
…I’m all for “losing” 13 mins and saving $9+
Just more time soaking up Vitamin D in the driver’s seat.
If it’s a comfort thing then great, to each their own. I’m not judging you and I pretty much always drive exactly the speed limit because it is much less stressful than worrying about passing and cops, etc.
But if your gunna do numbers…
A 2mpg improvement means you saved .4 gallons of gas over 120 miles. Gas at $4 a gallon means you saved $1.60.
That’s basically selling 13 minutes of your life for $1.60 (or 7.39 an hour).
I had a Mazda3 that had a MPGometer that updated so infrequently, it drove me nuts. Like once per trip. I’ve got a Hyundai Santa Fe that updates it every few minutes, which is much more helpful. I’ve gotten it above 30 when there’s no traffic on the freeways at night. It was glorious.
I think you are giving too much credit for it being a hybrid and not enough credit for you trying to drive the speed limit with the mpg meters in front of your face making you want to avoid hard acceleration. I have hit 40 mpg around the city and over 50 mpg on country roads keeping it under 60 mph and my 2023 Kia Rio hatchback is not a hybrid. Keeping you RPM low is still making the most difference even if they are not showing you a tachometer.
The Forester is a disappointment in the MPG department. My SC430 gets 25.0 with the cruise control set at 80 on the interstate, with a V8. (At 55, it reaches almost 30!).
Just you wait until you have a plug-in hybrid! Then the goal will be to maximize how far you can go in the EV mode before the gas engine kicks in.
On the other side of the equation, wait until you figure out how to maximize acceleration by judicious use of the electric motor. Hint: When the electric motor is at its lowest RPM is when the acceleration is the highest. So, to get a burst of acceleration, back off the throttle slightly to let the gas motor take over and the electric revs lower, then punch it to let the lower RPM electric motor kick in. This does terrible things to your battery range however. That is how my brain understands it anyway. Worked great in my Gen 2 Prius. I could run the battery down going up a 3 mile twisty road. The 25 MPH afterwards up the rest of the hill wasn’t fun though.
I wouldn’t say I hypermile but I do enjoy trying to get the instant mpg counter up in my car. It’s not a very efficient vehicle whatsoever, but my current goal is to get it up to 20mpg, the highest I’ve ever gotten was 19.3. The engine makes enough power low in the rev range that if I’m light enough on the gas I can keep it under 2200rpm most of the time.
An easy, if messy, route to driving slower, smoother and safer is to have two dogs who get violently car-sick. You will do anything not to brake or accelerate hard or take a corner too fast, so everything slows down and you read as far down the road as possible.
Hahaha
I’ve heard of race car driving schools that used a cleaner version of this in the form of a bowl of water on the dashboard… goal of course being go as fast as you can around the track w/o spilling any water
I’m sailing away
Set an open course with less urgency
Cause I’ve got to be free
Free to face the miles just ahead of me
Domo arigato.
It was the same in my Passat TDI. Instead of my usual car with “powah!, I was hypermiling to see how good of an MPG I could get on a trip (we have hills so my best was 50 MPG). Now I have a newish BMW and I have no idea what my MPG is but it would certainly improve if I didn’t stomp on it as often. Something I rarely ever did in the Passat.
Hypermiling is cool and so is power. Vehicles are just great.
I have the same issue in my wife’s Wrangler 4xe. Growing up, Dad always went for power, even throwing a turbo on our Caprice Estate (“to tow better”), along with various Corvettes, an LT1 Impala, even a Regal T-Type. The Wrangler will chirp the tires from a dea stop in 4wd so you’d expect that I’m redlining it constantly, but instead I’m staring at the power meter willing it to stay under 50% so the ICE doesn’t kick on. Unlike my wife, however, I’m perversely excited when FORM kicks in and the ICE is forced to operate. It’s the only time I cheer for a light to turn red in front of me.
I like to do this in my car, and I’ve developed a pretty thorough spreadsheet for keeping track of not just MPG, but also price, how much gas is left in the tank when I fill it, miles per day, etc. It’s all nice and color-coded. I shake my fist when the numbers suck as I fill it in. It’s interesting to look back at the sheets for my past cars for comparison, and sometimes it reveals some interesting patterns.
But even as I do all that, I know that it doesn’t really matter, it’s just a few cents here or there. It’s just for fun, and it’s a good excuse to make a spreadsheet.
I haven’t driven a hybrid yet but I do try to coast as much as possible and am always light on the gas, unless absolutely necessary, when I drive. My last car’s city fuel economy was very poor 14 or 15 in comparison to the 19 or 20 I’d get on highway stretches, but I nearly perfected maintaining that highway number or at least close to it just by being light on the throttle and coasting.
I got an OBD gauge for my gas car, and it too had an elapsed time gauge. Like you said, it made driving stressful and anger inducing, so I eventually unplugged it.
Since I got an EV everything’s about efficiency! Just yesterday on the highway, I ended up drafting behind a bus that was driving slightly above the pace of traffic; ended up getting 9-10kWh/100km (6.5mi/kWh ish) at 60mph. The car usually takes 2kW more on the same stretch of road, so over 50km I saved around 1kWh, and over an hour I should “save” around 2kWh and 20km of range, which is nothing to sneeze at.
do the same since I discovered the “average after starting” dash page in my car, it tells me both speed and consumption average until the next time I start the car, now I’m always practicing zen driving to keep my average nice and consistent
I’ve definitely noticed similar since getting my Prius. Not that I generally drove like a maniac in my van (generally), but having an instant-MPG display is helpful.
But if you’re really trying to maximize MPG, do make sure to compare your gallons-added on the receipt vs. “trip odometer since last fill-up” and put it into a calculator manually. I’ve never seen a vehicle that didn’t show higher on the display than in reality.