Rush hour pleasures

Just got back from a run to the airport. The first part of my trip is on surface roads with a 45 mph speed limit. But the majority of the trip is highway and when I was about halfway to the airport the mileage readout said 48 MPG.

Then I saw the brake lights ahead. A long line of traffic snaked into the distance, as far as I could see. Funny thing is, it didn't bother me as much as usual. Not that I love bumper to bumper traffic all of a sudden, it's just that now I know that it will probably give me an opportunity to up my MPG for this trip.

As soon as I braked the Fusion switched over to electric. Yeah, I'm not burning gas in this baby waiting for this to clear up!
We crept along, stop and go, the mileage bumped up 50, 51, 52, finally the traffic cleared up about 2 miles down and I had reached 55.6 MPG.

Traffic is never fun. But now you can save money when you hit a bit of it. Kinda crazy!

Charge Management

As I have gotten better and better at exceeding the EPA mileage rating for this car, I've learned more about how the
battery charging system works. And, how to maximize the charge, or as the title of this entry "Charge Management".

One thing I noticed pretty quick, you can get some incredible mileage on short hops to a store and back. But, what was
happening was that I would leave with a charged up battery, and return with the charge quite a bit lower. So the mileage
figure wasn't accurate. So, keeping that charge up is important.

Now, what happens if one just depletes the charge. As stated in an earlier entry, eventually the gas engine comes on and
runs for a few minutes to charge the battery back up. I've noticed that this happens in two different patterns.

The first pattern is this: the engine comes on and runs until the battery charge is a bit higher then midway on the gauge. This seems to be quite precise and the engine shuts off at the same point each time. Once the charge line gets to the top of the "+" and "-" signs on the gauge, you can run in electric again.

Now, as I said, there is a second pattern of charging that occurs. I'll call this a "deep cycle charge". What happens here is that the engine keeps charging until the charge is at the top of the gauge, quite a bit higher then the former charge cycle.

This charge cycle seems to come on every day at some point, when I'm doing around town suburban driving. I talk a road trip on the highway today, and it did not come on at all, probably because the battery tends to stay charged up in highway driving.

Automatic battery cycling

OK, the title of this entry may sound a bit nerdy. . .and probably is. But worth talking about for sure.

One thing you will notice pretty quickly is that if you try to get every last ounce of power out of the battery, by driving on it as much as possible and not giving it adequate time to recharge normally, eventually the FusionH will just override your inputs and start charging the battery. When this happens, it will not kick over into EV mode no matter what your input. You can stop at a traffic light, or drift down a long hill, still the engine will be running recharging the battery. This cycle will run for some period of time, it seems like maybe 5 - 7 minutes, and then you will see the charge rise on the charging gauge and once it gets to a high enough level you will begin to be able to engage the EV mode again normally.

I'm still learning about this cycle and intend to do another post shortly as more info becomes available.

Keeping the hybrid battery charged

One thing you realize quickly with the FusionH (and Prius and Escape and Insight) is simply this: the more charge in the battery the better your MPG is gonna be. So part of the art of maximizing your mileage relates directly to keeping your battery charge up.

I'm still figuring out all the nuances of how the battery charging works and will devote an upcoming post with more details soon. However, I've come up with one trick that is easy to do and helps keep the charge up.

Here's how it works:

Remember that the braking system on the FusionH is really a generator that feeds power back into the battery. Every time you use the brakes you are recharging your battery. In fact you can see this on your battery gauge, especially after a few stops right in a row. Now, the way I use this to my advantage is going down long hills. If you have a good size hill that you are going down, and you are at the speed limit and no one is behind you, then you can lightly "ride" the brakes so that the battery charging symbol comes on. In many cases this isn't riding the brakes at all, it's simply engaging the generator. As the car tends to pick up speed going down a hill, you can hold it back to the speed limit and the generator will send power right back into the battery. If you are on a good size hill, the gain can be quite significant.

As always, one needs to use normal good judgement and care in any type of driving technique, including this one. For example, if I'm coming down a hill and there is an aggressive driver right on my bumper I would not use this technique so as not to aggravate the driver behind me, who is in a rush and perhaps not really focusing as much on safe driving skills as he or she should. It is always critial to be aware of other drivers who are distracted or aggressive or not careful and stay as clear of them as possible.

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.