Recent content by rwsimon

I drove a Prius 3 years before getting the Accord PHEV. The Prius is much more plastic-y and cheap looking inside, has terrible rear visibility and handles very poorly in snow and ice. It does have considerably more cargo space. In comparison, the Accord is a much more solid and comfortable...

I am a little disappointed to hear that the electric range dropping in half in cold weather is "normal" for the car. I was hoping that my car has a problem that needs to be fixed. Cold weather is always worse for hybrids and electrics, but it seems to me that this car is particularly bad in...

Cobra, based on your experience, it seems as though the real issue is use of the heater. That certainly makes sense. But in our part of the country (the northeast), not using heat in the dead of winter is not really an option. It will be interesting to see how much lower the displayed full...

It seems like this electic range drop is happening to lots of us. I got a solid 14-16 miles all through the summer. Now it is about 10-11 and still dropping, and it isn't even all that cold yet (30s-40's). My Prius lost 10% of its gas mileage in the winter! but this is much worse. I wonder...

For PHEV owners who live in places where it gets cold: are you seeing a drop off in electric range on your car? My full charges used to be 15-16 miles. Now that it is much colder out, they are 11 or 12. Are others seeing this too?

It is true that there is no display of electrical efficiency. Given that the car switches between gas mode and electric mode for various reasons and at various times, I am not sure how one could even do that. The EV range display can go up while driving, stay constant for considerable...

@Cobra, the EPA's MPGe rating on the car is about 115, as I recall. In any case, it takes about 4 kWh to charge the battery and you get around 15 miles for that. So the electric efficiency is around 3.75 miles/kWh. The MPGe rating is derived from converting kWh to the equivalent energy in...

I've had my PHEV for about 5 months now and have a pretty good idea of what kind of fuel economy it provides. I have about 4,000 miles on the car and I average about 800 miles between fill-ups. What does this really mean? Well, the car goes about 15 miles on an electric charge and it gets...

I don't see any economic justification for switching in and out of the HV mode at first blush. If you want to really game the system, I suppose you could try to maximize the use of electric miles at times when gas mileage would be worst, but that is pretty hard to control. Otherwise, you get...

I'm not sure I follow you, Accordman. You drove 1,100 miles on one tank of gas and only charged the batteries twice? And you say you got 49 mpg? That doesn't add up. The batteries got you 30 miles. Where did the other 1,070 come from? Certainly not half a tank of gas. Please clarify.

As far as I can tell, the only reason to use the HV mode setting is if you have electric miles available and want to save them for later rather than use them up immediately. Frankly, I can't think of a reason you would want to do that, but perhaps there is one that doesn't occur to me.

Out of curiosity, why get an L2 charger? Charging on 120 takes about 3 hours. How often is it useful to charge at home more quickly than that? On the road, I really appreciate using public chargers that do the job in 25 minutes, since I am not likely to be sticking around for hours, but at...

I suspect that the range readout after charging is a function of the driving history. In other words, if the way you have driven most recently resulted in a large electric range, then the estimate for the new full charge will be higher. I would think that the actual amount of energy at full...

The trip computer basically measures the amount of gas used and compares it to the miles driven that trip. It does not "know" that some of the miles are electric and used no gas. So it will report a higher number than your actual gas mileage. Mine is reading about 100 mpg on this tank so far...

I have only had my Accord PHEV for a couple of weeks and have about 425 miles on it so far. I've only used 1/3 of a tank of gas, so I really have no idea what kind of gas mileage it gets. Anybody out there driven enough to get some gas mileage data?