When you all say "coast" do you mean neutral or just keeping your foot off the gas in drive?

 

When I talk about coasting, I mean foot off the gas. At 40 mph or below, you can press the brakes twice in a row, which shuts the ICE off, so you're not even using any fuel, let alone a little.

If you keep some slight pressure on the gas, you can sometimes get the vehicle into a neutral power setting, where it's not taking drive power to recharge the battery, but not contributing any either, in a zero power usage situation where the vehicle is rolling on forward momentum, but it's not a real big issue, at least in my experience.

 

I have found while driving at between 60-65 mph that I can drop (let off the pedal) RPM's from 2000 to 1500-1800 and not drop the mph. It seems that the added presure on the pedal just raises the RPM and burns more gas. It maybe because the ice doesn't need to be pulling the generator as the batteries all fully charged. Its great to feel the FEH is coasting at 60-65 mph with the A/C on. I found this out while waiting for a truck behind me to pass so I could draft it. Also I reset my 15 min. average and found I was getting around 38 mpg in this mode. alot better than the EPA's 31 highway rating. Pedal presure and RPM are the key for me.

 

I have found the same thing; if I can keep the RPM under 2K (the lower the better), and the speed at least 35 (optimum seems to be about 40-45), I am always gaining in my average MPG. I haven't set the "average FE" back to see what I'm actually getting, but I know it's over 35 mpg because I can be in the 34's and the number keeps going up, all the way to 35 and sometimes beyond, whenever I can maintain these conditions. Then of course it drops a bit when I'm going up a hill and can't maintain speed without raising RPM above 2-2.5K. Allowing speed to drop to keep RPM low hurts almost as much as increasing RPM to keep speed up, but I thind the former is preferable as long as speed doesn't go below about 30 mph.

Of course, if I had the nav/energy option I would have a better idea what's actually going on, but I've been doing OK with the general theory that higher RPM = more gas (i.e., "gallons" from the "miles per gallon" formula) and higher speed = more miles, so to increase "MPG" I try to keep the "G" as low as I can for the speed. Low speed + high RPM = terrible mileage, high speed + low RPM = best mileage. This seems to be a good principle to remember, and work with, if you don't have the detailed feedback from the optional package.