SnitGTS

You must be keeping it under 40 at all times, since I've caught the bug I've been accelerating extremely slow and keeping it under 50 and I am only getting about 65% EV, you're at 80% EV!!! :superhero: I'm clinging to 52 mpg and you're at 63!?!? :confused:

To add to the rain affecting your mileage talk, yesterday it was pouring here and I got my worst mileage ever coming home. I normally average around 45 mpg coming home and yesterday it was 33.6 mpg. I was in a lot of traffic too, normal trip takes me 30 minutes and yesterday it was over an hour ride. You would think this would have helped, but the battery was very low when I hit the worst of the traffic and I never got up fast enough to get any regenerative braking, twice it ran the ICE for a few minutes to charge the battery while I was essentially not moving. My mileage for my tank dropped from 52.6 to 51.3 because of the trip as well and there is no way I will hit 700 miles for the tank now.

I drove up to my friends house on Friday, there was a long but gentle down hill to get to his house and by the time I got there my battery was almost full. I walked in and my friend needed to run to the bank, so I told him I'd drive since he hadn't seen my new car yet. Drove 0.3 miles to the bank fully in EV mode and got 999.9 mpg, drove the 0.3 miles back and got the same 999.9 mpg. I've gotten that pulling into my garage before but never actually going any distance on a street. Needless to say he was impressed!

Ok guys, here it is, the first 1,000 mile tank!!! :happy feet: :camera: Well, if I had a 20 gallon tank I would have! ;) Just passed 1,000 miles on the car at an average of 50.3 mpg! :yahoo: My average for the 450 miles on my second tank is 52.6 mpg, lifetime average is up to 47.4 mpg, when I got the car it had a 19.8 mpg average. If I keep this up for another tank of gas or two my lifetime should pass 50.

BTW, just topped 1,000 miles on my way home from my parents house today and when I turned the car off my lifetime average has hit 47.0 mpg. As soon as trip #2 hits 1,000 (another 40 miles or so) I will take a picture and post it, if I can get the mileage up a little bit I will have driven my first 1,000 miles in under 20 gallons!

I'm very happy with my choice of the SE, I got the 202A package (MFT & Sync) and the winter package (heated seats, heated power side mirrors). I really wanted the rear view camera as well, but to get that I would have had to upgrade to the SEL and get the 302A package which would have added about $4k to the price of the car. As much as I wanted the rear view camera it was not worth $4k to me, I'm going to buy a house next summer so I'm on a budget and that would have exceeded it. Plus, I really do not like leather seats and there was no option in the SEL to get cloth seats. I will end up getting an aftermarket rear view camera at some point, I'm thinking of one of the Gentex mirrors would be nice so I can get the integrated garage door opener as well. I also considered the Energi model but I thought the battery pack took up too much room in the trunk, plus the federal tax rebate was only $3,750 which would put the cost in the SEL territory and thus out of my budget. Edit: Just to answer the topic, I don't think one is "smarter" then the other, it depends on what you are looking for. I got a great car for a great price, we all did!

I'm REALLY paying attention to my braking now because I have Progressive for my insurance and I'm doing the Snapshot where they track your driving for a month and then give you up to a 30% discount if you do good enough. I read that hard braking was what they are primarily looking for, if you slow more than 7 mph per second the device beeps at you. So far I've had it in for 12 days and I've only had two beeps, first was on the very first day a bunny ran out in front of me and the second was because someone pulled out in front of me when I was moving 45 mph...

I still do this sometimes, but I'm trying my hardest to brake enough because it seems that getting 95% + scores recharges your battery quite a bit, clamping down on the brakes at the end really hurt the score.

I spotted my first C-Max on Friday! I was on my way to my friends house and I was just driving along and then out of no where a Ruby Red C-Max was right even with me! I don't think the guy ever looked over, but for a while we were both chugging along taking up two lanes of a three lane highway going about 50 mph (in a 50 mph zone) where it isn't that uncommon for people to drive 65-70. Eventually we hit some traffic and I ended up pulling away from him, but I was looking at the car in my rear view mirror I'm pretty sure it was an SE model. Anyone in NJ with a Ruby Red pull up along a Sterling Gray on Friday? If so, that might have been me!

If they do then that's my next car! (I'll give my current C-Max to my girlfriend, she loves it just as much as I do!)

I hear you on the buttheads on the road, but it is possible to get good braking scores even with them. My strategy is to keep a few extra car lengths between me and the car in front of me and to try my hardest to anticipate in advance of when I am going to have to brake. I've personally always been that way, I watch all the cars around me and try to figure out what they are going to do, even when I was a more aggressive driver I was watching out for the buttheads. If I even have an inkling we might be stopping I immediately take my foot off the gas and coast, even if we end up not stopping it's not like I'm losing a lot of speed to coasting. As soon as I see I will need to brake I brake a little hard at first and then brake just hard enough to end up stopping right behind the guy in front of me. Sometimes you get bad scores, but more often than not by anticipating what is going to happen I can pretty consistently get 100's.

I totally agree with you, before I got my C-Max I had no idea just how hilly this place is! Now almost everything is a hill, even what is relatively flat I can tell one direction always takes a little more power. I think more than anything my second tank of gas is 2-3 mpg better because I have started to learn some tricks about how best to handle my route to and from work. I'm definitely starting to catch the bug...

The gas pods look like something the mythbusters should be testing! Does anyone have any real world experience with them? The concept seems logical but does it actually work?

Could the open area under the cargo compartment be to help with cooling the battery pack?

Jus, are you doing anything special to get 80% of your miles as EV miles? Even on my best individual trip I only got 73.6%, with 12.5 miles driven 9.2 miles in EV. My overall average is 63%...

I used a few techniques I saw on the Mythbuster's hypermiling episode last night (<45 mph & slow acceleration) and got my personal best FE driving to work! Unfortunately on my way home it was raining and I only got 45 mpg... Lifetime is almost to the 47 mpg the car is rated at! (I started with a 19.8 mpg lifetime average and have not reset it)

Here is a link to the aftershow: http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/hypermiling-aftershow.htm#mkcpgn=fbdsc17

they busted doubling the mileage with hyper-miling techniques, but Tory got 70% better mileage and Keri got 40% better.

That's amazing Jus! Congrats! 837 to empty is amazing! When I filled up my miles to empty said 670 and after driving for a couple weeks I'm right on track, 241.4 miles right now and I burned 4.67 gallons, bump that up to 13 gallons and it is 672 miles. Who's going to be the first to 800?

they had 30% better fuel economy driving 45 mph around a circular course ten times then at 65 mph doing the same thing. Edit: they are using a regular car, not a hybrid

The pump will calculate the cost from the gallons it says it's delivering, so that trick won't help. The only way to test the pumps is to get a 5 gallon container and fill it up to the 5 gallon marker and see what the pump says it's pumped. I updated my fuelly to reflect the gas my car says it has used.

Yup, that's 19! I'd love to be #20 but it's going to be a few weeks at least before I drive far enough...