The one caveat on cruise control on hills is that with the HCHII it's the only way to maintain anythign close to your desired speed *while preserving the battery charge.* One weakness of the HCHII system is that Assist is pretty much linked to throttle position. When you go up a hill at highway speeds, if you don't give it more gas, your speed plummets. If you do give it more gas, you will *have to* use Assist and the battery will flatten dismally quickly. The obvious drawback is now you're lugging all the electric gear up the hill not with very little assist but with no assist whatsoever.

So, if you're on a long hill and you want more constant assist all the way up, rather than flattening the battery in the first mile by running manually, you might run it with the CC on, but dropping the target speed (with the decel button) every time the revs start to spike (as they will when the car drops more than 1 mile per hour below its target speed). You can run the hill basically dropping 2 miles per hour every half-mile or so that you go (depending of course on steepness and your set speed), and if now and then you goose the throttle just a little manually, you can get the most out of the battery while draining it more slowly.

Also, be aware (at least this is true for my car) that when you run hills on CC without intervening, not only will the CC spike the revs to maintain speed, it will actually keep them spiked until the car is 1 mile per hour *over* your set speed: this seems the only way for the computer to get the message that the car is again going as fast as you asked it to.

I'm surprised, as smart as Honda is about power management, that they didn't build any kind of hill-logic into the CC whatsoever. It's a dumb, dumb system. But a pretty useful one when aided by a human brain willing to "coach" it a bit.

Cheers --
doug

 

Excellent points, Doug!

 

I think Spinner and Doug nailed it pretty well bang on! H