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Addiction to CC?? Perhaps cruise control? I never use it when commuting; it keeps ICE on most all the time. I tracked mileage just about every time I got in the car at first, but settled on tracking two routes, a mostly rural route through the suburbs (35-45 mph limits) and an expressway route, 55-65 mph limits save for ingress and egress surface roads. I took a month to learn the car (August, '13), then baselined both routes for the month of September, getting the PCM upgrade in early October and switching to snows before Thanksgiving. So the 12.5% includes the PCM upgrade, vortex generators, grill blocks, and a slight change in acceleration criteria from "2-bar or as much as will still charge the battery" to "1.5-2 bars max" unless traffic/road conditions warrant more (e.g. entering expressways) Gee, I never posted the rural route... the two low spots are crossing the creek that's in my back yard, well below house level. You'd never pickout the high spot without mapping it (I did). Expressway, the profile is very different, with a low spot going over the mouth of the same creek, at Lake Ontario level, that feels nowhere near as sharp or deep as shown, but still 60' above lake level. I'm now testing this route as I expect AC will have less effect at speed... and I can usually get by without in the mornings, so there's basis for comarison. On the aero side, having added gills (as my kids call the vortex generators) to the rear quarters around the tail lights, with no obvious improvement, I moved forward, most recently adding an air dam and side skirts. That said, I have developed a semi-boat tail concept, based on a folded-up hitch platform, but I'm leery of extremely low Cd due to the accompanying reduction in cross-wind stability. Hucho is required reading if you're serious about aero mods. As I said, just starting to reassess highway technique, with some very good results combining high ICE in the high-speed section with normal P&G on hills and today, a bit of drafting from a UPS truck that followed my normal P&G pattern for several miles, netting me a 52.1 mpg this morning, after a 49.6 yesterday. Too soon for conclusions, though... but this is a lot more fun than Winter!!! HAve fun, Frank

+2, especially in Winter. As to Adrian's apparenlty august soccer career, remember that SUV's started in 1935 when GM inroduced "a pickup type front end with a station wagon type body mounted on a pickup chassis" as the "Suburban Carryall." The SUV nomenclature is just marketingspeak to convince people they need things they really don't, like high ground clearance and 4WD, which are cheap to deliver and very, very profitable. Subsequent nomenclature has evolved to fit marketings's needs... not ours. HAve fun, Frank

Who needs a cat? I opened and closed it several times while installing the trailer hitch! Now I kick the hitch to open, as it blocks the sensor... no more cat issues! Frank

Nice design; got a printable file? Pre-perf'ed business card stock isnt' hard to come by... Frank

First, visit Ford's electronic technical information site http://www.etis.ford.com/home.do, enter your VIN and you'll learn a lot about your vehicle, including any outstanding recalls or retrofits. Then browse this site as you'll find everything from hypermiling to roof racks for bikes. Great variety, with just enough dissent (lemon law by-backs, battery issues, etc.) to keep us honest. It's not all sweetness and light! Have fun, Frank

Which one? We looked at a Rover 8... and would have purchased it and a trainer in place of a stationary, had my wife been able to use it. I liked the extensibility to tandem, seat height, weight capacity, but not the lack of low gears, the high hand position or weight of a steel frame. The top chain is asking for stains, and any boom length change requires chain length adjustment - very hard for two mis-matched people to use the same one. Mine's a Catrike Villager, 34 lb., to answer Paul's question. My only excuse is that I had tried a HP Velo Scorpion some years back, after hearing lots of good things about the Sun EZ-3 USX... finally tried a USX and it is as heavy and long as it looks, and I didn't revisit the $4K Scorpion. So far, riding around my somewhat hilly neighborhood for now, my legs get tired, but I'm not out of breath... 30 speeds is a wonderful thing, as well as the inability to fall off no matter how slow you go! Top gear downhill gets scary-fast real quick! (Of course, the hill's good for 30mph by itself!) HAve fun, Frank PS need to plug the BicycleMan, too.

Yet another object that nicely fits in this Tardis-like vehicle... Frank

Boy, this is a moldy oldie! See post 42. I got 10 18-inchers from Monoprice the previous Christmas, dispersed among family members, but not into my briefcase.

Total base number (TBN) is a measure of a lubricant's reserve alkalinity. I linked to the wiki page; it's links came over with the quote. It's important as a measure of remaining oil life... I imagine fleet owners might negotiate a discount; at 1-2 samples per year, I don't see any incentive on their side while I have a $25K investment whose longevity is important to me, and whose run mode is very different (runs cold alot, with many start/stop events). Frank

While this wasn't a matter of driving style, I followed an Ice Storm twin on the freeway today, with the right side chin spoiler ripped off and hanging by the screws at the outboard end. At first I thought they had caught a stick under the nose, but then I recognized the taper of the black plastic and the attachement features. This is the ~20 inch black piece that wraps from the front tire spoilers around the front, attached with four of the plug-type fastners I removed when building my front air dam. My exit came up before I could get a second look... HAve fun, Frank

Time to work. Courtesy to other drivers. The speed vs. mileage tradeoff is a red herring in my mind. If you really want to reduce fuel use, you ride a bike. Not always practical, but illustrative of the tradeoff; zero MPH is infinite MPG. Switching to a hybrid has so greatly reduced my fuel expense that cost isn't a big factor either, at least now that the weather's warmer. For me, consistency is a top priority, as I gain value in life from learning. Knowledge is the one thing you can take with you... and this car is teaching me practical aerodynamics. EcoCruise is also a red herring; the EV threshold is too low for it to engage on its own in any sort of productive way. I use it to maintain minimum speed, and then only on highways, as the speed limits are changing too often on my rural commute. And where do I set it - minimum speed at the posted speed limit or maximum speed? If you don't P&G your hybrid, you're missing the one thing that works really well in my experience. The car enables it, but it's not free; it requires constant attention - just the thing to keep my mind occupied on the way to work. What I've described has my mileage up 12.5% over the baselining period last year. 1 free gallon for every 8 used. I've now switched commutes to see what I can get at highway speeds, where some of the aero mods ought to have greater benefit... 49.7MPG this AM is very good, but one point is worthless. I'll report in August. Finally, 15 miles and 30 minutes is not a "short" trip... SOC has far less effect than traffic, weather and elevation change. The wife and I did a 150 miles road trip Saturday (see my post in "what's in your C-Max) and I got high 30's on the way down using 2-lane routes through the countryside. On the way back I took the freeway and got low 60's going 70 mph most of the way. The reason is obvious from this chart of the route elevation... Don't dismiss the value of 1/4 SOC taking you a mile or two... if you start faster than you end. HAve fun, Frank

I'm of the opinion that we humans don't invent, we discover. Innovative solutions are out there, but obscured by the limits of human perception and conception. The advance of technology that marks humanity as different from the rest of life on this planet, is a result of changes in the way we look at things. A rock is a rock, until we figure out how to break it to form a tool (stone age) or melt it to reveal the metal inside (bronze/iron age), or learn how to make it "just so." (as in the silicon wafers used to make solid state electronics). That's one reason for posting our projects; other people may discover even better ways of doing things. As Sir Isaac Newton paraphrased Bernard of Chartres: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants" HAve fun, Frank, the philosopher (in the classical sense)

I've been at it again with aluminum angle stock, this time side skirts. The car has a plastic rocker panel cover with removable plastic fasteners on the underside and fairly standard plug-style panel holders along the upper edge, behind the door. One fastener in the front, to the wheel well panel, and the rest on the underside. They look like this, with center plug pulled, and in total. I made the skirts from 1.5" angle stock, a pair of 8-footers, instead of 2" by mistake, but it's a good idea as it maintains 5" of ground clearance on the sides. The front is bent inward, to shed the wheel turbulence, and upward to match rocker panel contour. The back is bent outward, and the excess angle stock used to create an inner skirt angled inward, forming a wedge in front of the rear tire. To fabricate the skirt, I removed the drivers' side panels by prying the upper plugs out of their holes. I made both from this template, and installed the passengers' side with just the lower plugs removed. It's 1/4" too far forward on that side. The skirt is held on with a combination of 2-sided mounting tape and 9 pop rivets with backing washers. As with the air dam, from a distance, you can't see a thing unless you know where to look. I painted all three with truck bed liner and it's a nice match to the black plastic rockers. I'm quite happy with the result, and hopefully, it'll last! HAve fun,Frank

$25, +$10 for TBN, and you want TBN!

That can be fixed... beforehand, of course! I used Blackstone for analysis of my second change, the first 10K interval, with interesting results. Pay no attention to the "oil used" section as it was standard Ford 5W20 synthetic blend, not Mobil 1... and do request TBN if you use them; it was interesting. PORTER-013114.pdf Pushing 25K miles now, so another change is on the horizon, and a second data point will tell me more than the first did... Have fun,Frank