Highway MPG rating seems completely wrong

If you check out the MPG ratings on the Ford Motors website you find ratings of:

city: 41 MPG

highway: 36 MPG

I've been driving the FusionH for close to 2 months now and have never gotten lower then 42 MPG on the highway, and usually it's 43 or 43.5. I have no idea why the EPA rating is so low. There isn't that much that I've found that can boost your fuel economy on the highway, I just drive really, that's about it. Since the gas engine is on all the time above 47 mph, then I haven't figured out much I can do to boost it. How the figure of 36 was derived I have no idea.

Anyone have a different experience, and getting better (or worse) highway mileage? Also, looking for tips on highway hypermiling if any. I usually drive about 65 to 70.

It's hot outside let's have some AC!

It was 94 degrees here yesterday. Maybe I'll take a mileage hit, but (of course) I'm using the AC. So the question became, how much of a mileage hit would running AC result in?

First, I'm not an engineer, but it would seem obvious that doing air conditioning in a hybrid is alot different then a conventional vehicle. That's because the AC compressor in a typical non-hybrid runs right off of the engine power. If I'm not mistaken, it is usually a compressor hooked onto that long belt that snakes around the front of the engine. And it doesn't take a detective to deduce that it probably takes quite a bit of power to run that compressor.

But in a hybrid this set up clearly doesn't work, simply because the engine doesn't run all the time, so the AC would start and stop which would not work at all.

So the AC in a hybrid must run off of the battery, and must pull alot of juice to keep it going. If anyone can shed more light on how this works let me know, but hope I'm in the general ballpark.

So getting back to the mileage hit, what I'm seeing is about 10 mpg when the AC is running continuously. So a trip that I might score a 60 mpg on now falls back to around 50 mpg.

The right side of the SmartGauge

I've been meaning to get around to the other side of the SmartGauge, to the right of the speedo. We've got 2 gauges here and a few readouts. The gauges are the fuel gauge and instantaneous MPG gauge. Then there is a bar chart. Let's start with the fuel gauge. What we have here is something that appears to be kinda a cutaway of a fuel tank, filled with gasoline colored liquid. The liquid is actually translucent. Well it's just a fuel gauge but arguably the coolest looking fuel on any car I've ever seen. I mention this to illustrate a point: it's like Ford took a hard look at every detail on the Fusion and said, "Now what can we do to make this better, more useful, cooler?" I like this kind of thinking. It reminds me of Apple's products, someone just wants to spend the extra time and money to add delight to a design. Probably most people don't care or notice but I think it's just great thinking. You see this throughout the vehicle. Oh by the way, the level on the fuel tank drop s-l-o-w-l-y.

Alright so let's get off of the damn fuel gauge. To the right is the instantaneous MPG readout. Lots of cars have a gauge like this but this one looks and works terrific.

Like some of the other gauges, the red needle moves in real time. It bounces up and down depending on how hard you are depressing the accelerator basically. Here's what it does when you switch from gas to electric: basically the red needle shoots to the top of gauge and pins at 60 MPG. Then about 2 seconds later, if you stay in electric mode, a little "+" sign fades in next to the 60 so it says 60+. Is that cool or what? I try to stay in 60+ as long as possible obviously.

OK, one other item here it's a data readout bar chart on the far right. Now, this is a user selectable and configurable item. The FusionH usually has a vine with leaves growing on it. I think I got all the leaves like on the first day. So you can drop the vine and switch to a moving bar chart. Each bar shows you what your MPG has been over the last period of time. You can configure it several ways and I liked setting it up so each bar is 1 minute. So what you see are 1 minute snapshots of what your MPG is. Useful? I don't know. Geeky? For sure. How many people have a constantly changing bar chart on their dashboard?

Two other smaller items to mention. First note where it says "mpg 65.0 avg". That is something you can reset anytime. If I go on a drive somewhere I frequently reset this right out of the gate and see how I do. This is a useful readout and it updates about once a second which is actually quite useful and cool. If you have a good charge in your battery and start off running on electricity you will "pin" this readout at 99.9 within a few minutes. What would be really crazy cool would be if Ford would put another digit on this so that it would go even higher.

The last item is the miles to empty. Looks like I've got alot of miles left in this tank.

67.1 MPG!

My son has a summer job and I drive him to work each day, a round trip of about 14 miles. There are two choices on the route basically. We can take the direct route along the highway, or a back route through a town. Takes about 4 minutes more to take the back route. But it can make a huge difference in the MPG that you get in the FusionH. Here's why:

Driving the highway the speed is roughly 55 mph. Recall that the FusionH will run in electric up to about 47 mph. Above that the gas engine runs continuously. So by running the highway route, you are running on gas the whole way. The roundtrip figures I've been getting are around 45 MPG.

OK, so lately I've been experimenting with the back way. This is typical suburban type driving, a few stop lights, top speed about 40 mph. Last night I took this route and came back with 67.1 MPG(!) That's my top MPG for this run, usually I'm squeaking in at around 61 or so. I'm refining my hypermiling technique a bit, which I will describe shortly in upcoming posts.

The REALLY Smart gauge in the SmartGauge

Here is the left side of the SmartGauge and this is where the action really happens. The most important readout here is the one labeled PWR at top and EV at bottom. Note the red horizontal needle resting just about EV. This red needle constantly moves as you drive.

Now, the cool thing is this, if you can keep the red needle in the green box around EV, then you are in electric mode. You are running entirely on the battery. In other words: driving for FREE. Free is good. The green box actually expands and contracts, also as you drive. This shot was done in my drive so the green box is contracted and is small.

You control the red needle as you drive by how much you are pressing on the accelerator pedal. Press alot and the needle moves out of the box. Drive lightly, and if you have enough charge, you can really stay in the green box and maximize your MPG. And I mean really maximize, you will get much higher then the 41 MPG that is on the window sticker.

Another gauge of interest is the one directly to the right. This the battery charge readout. H for high and L for low obviously. This also changes while you drive but much more slowly then the EV gauge just discussed. When the horizontal line is around the middle you have plenty of charge to drive on electric.

Oh, one other thing, see in lower left corner it says Avg MPG 65.0. This is from a recent trip. This is not the average MPG over the long term. Just a really good trip for MPG! :)

The SmartGauge is smart

The way that you can easily (and significantly) exceed the EPA rated MPG on the FusionH is by using the innovative gauge cluster that Ford has developed. They call it the SmartGauge. And that's cool, it IS pretty smart. I love it.

First off here is an overall shot of the SmartGauge, next I'll include some close-ups and show how you can make it work for you. Sorry about low pict quality, this is from my iPhone.

What we have here is a traditional speedometer with 2 hi-res LCD screens on either side. Computer displays actually. The gauges are all in software, a little like a video game in say a flight simulator. Anyway, they work absolutely fantastic. See the red horizontal "needles" on some of the gauges? They actually programmed some "bounce" into them so they appear to behave like regular analog gauges, like a tachometer for example. Kudos off to the programmers doing stuff like this is REALLY sweating the details.

OK, I've got to get back to work, in the next post you'll see a review of the left LCD screen, the one with the most critical gauge for hypermiling.

First drives

My goal in starting this blog is to provide hypermiling info on the Fusion Hybrid. That is, to help owners who are interested in maximizing their MPG, learn how to do so by communicating with other FusionH owners.

So what have the MPG results been so far?

The FusionH is rated at 41 MPG. I'm not sure if that is city or highway or both. But anyway, right out of the box, my wife drove home on the highway and got 44 MPG. That night, I did my first drive. This was a suburban drive (taking my son over to a party about 3 miles away). I was new to the car, but tried to drive light just to see what would happen. 52.7 MPG! My gosh if this is my first effort, that's pretty amazing I thought. I was impressed.

Now, this was a short route so not much of a scientific test. I just tried to go light on the accelerator. I was watching the EV gauge trying to keep the Fusion running on electric as much as possible.

In the next post, I'll start getting into details about the gauge system (Ford calls it the SmartGauge). This is an excellent design and makes it fun and relatively easy to really boost your MPG. Stay tuned, more fun to come!

Why?

I'm a car guy. To put a sharper point on it, I'm a high performance car guy.

Most of the cars I've owned (or lusted for) have been performance vehicles of one sort or another. Corvette Split Window, a pair of SHO's, Corvette ZR-1, Porsche 930 (ok, that one is still in the lust category). Anyway, why did a guy like me get interested in purchasing a hybrid?

Reading somewhere that Ford was going to do a Fusion Hybrid was interesting. Then the early journalist's reviews started coming out. The car was rated at about 40 mpg. Journalists were getting figures in the mid to upper forties when they tried to hypermile. That is, when they tried to maximize their mileage.

On one review something jumped out, ". . .the Fusion Hybrid will go up to 47 mph on electricity alone. . ." Hmm. I began to wonder if one could really

jack up the mileage, that is, hypermile this baby. If you could go 47 mph I bet this thing could really turn out some great MPG numbers, driven carefully.

That was it, I went down to my Ford dealer and we did a deal during the last day that the $3400 tax credit was still in effect. Ford built the car and I picked it up about a month later.

Here's the thing: this car is a blast to drive. Most fun I've had since the ZR-1. Now, totally different ride, for sure, but fun every time I go somewhere. In fact, I make up excuses just to go out in the Fusion. Why? Because getting phenomenal gas mileage is addictive. That's what I'm finding.