You want to be driving in "D".

 

At 65 on the freeway with no A/C, my experience and that of a couple of other HCH owners that I work with, is 50-52 MPG. Even my wife gets that, when she goes the speed limit. So something is definitely fishy with your situation.

 

I don't know. My first tank barely broke 40, it was 40.5 MPGs to be exact, and that was in Florida in the late spring in the sun. I remember doing some highway driving around 70 MPH for a lot of that tank and when I did I dropped to about 35 MPGs. It wasn't until the last 100 miles that I shot up to 40, and that's because I was driving on 40 MPH roads. First tanks are hard, especially at high speeds. Yours sounds just slightly worse than many others around here, and that little drop could be attributed to a number of strategies rather than problems.

 

Yeah my first tank was low 40s too. Second was around 43, the one im on right now is 47.3 due to a lot of drafting behind semis on my 300 mile trip.

I could see high 20's if they're in an area with a lot of hills/mountains and dont really know the best way to drive a hybrid (putting their foot into it, not using econ, accelerating uphill, etc) On the way home I was getting <20 uphill through the mountains, gawd it killed me to watch that.

 

Check the tire pressure! Low pressure = high rolling resistance.

 

I have had a 2003 Civic CVT for about a year. Bought it used from someone who got it originally in Virginia. Our mileage has been consistently bad compared to others on this forum, we get 35-40 depending on how much highway use & AC use. (We live in Houston.)

A couple of observations. (I've already worked through the obvious stuff like tire pressure, etc.)

First, the readout on the dash is consistently higher than the number I get from the number of miles & gallons bought. I think the estimate is roughly 10% high.

Second, the readout on the dash is consistently higher at the beginning of the tank, but after about 100-150 miles it tends to begin dropping.

Third, I've looked at the data on this website and it seems that there is something different about Honda Hybrid CVT mileage performance compared to other hybrids. Look at the graphs for the vehicles with a substantial number of reports. They fall into three categories:
- Normal distribution (Civic CVT, Accord CVT- with outlier)
- Log normal distribution (Civic Manual, Prius I, Prius II)
- Irregular (Insight Manual)
(The rest have too little data to describe.)

My theory is that mileage should generally be log normal. You should see the vast majority of drivers clustered tightly around the vehicle's typical performance, then just a few low (heavy loads, etc.) and then a trail of high performers scattered off to the high end.

However, the CVT distributions look different - why are there so many CVT drivers (like me) with mileage well below the median? Do all the leadfoots drive CVTs and the smart drivers buy manuals? (I couldn't get a manual in Houston, one dealer said that Honda doesn't make them, sigh.) My theory is that the CVT models have some component of the CVT that isn't built/assembled in a perfectly consistent way.

I recently did the "recall" and asked that the car be checked for any obvious explanation for my "low" mileage. If they checked anything (which I doubt), they didn't find it. If anything, my mileage is worse after the "recall" than before.

 

Haha, even in S it should get better than 31mpg. Try having her feather the throttle.

 

CVT vs. manual from a lead foot perspective... advantage Manual. Why? In CVT, the car is trying to find the optimal balance between performance and fuel efficiency... if you floor it, the car is going to lean towards performance and gas mileage suffers. In a manual, you only have 5 gears to play with, so in order to mimic a CVT you would have to always downshift to the lowest gear possible every time you floor it. Do manual drivers do this always, the answer is NO.

Hence, all things being equal a lead foot driver in a CVT will always get worse mileage than their manual counterpart.

Food for thought:
If you allow a CVT car to "lock the gear" into place, then you would force the IMA system to come on more often then it currently does, thus increasing mpg in some cases. In a manual, you can accomplish this by shifting to the highest gear ASAP and force the IMA to come on more often when just cruising at 30mph. In a CVT, cruising at 30mph, the system will find the optimal fuel efficiency gear but it's almost impossible to get the IMA to kick in without changing the current gear ratio when the car bogs down... something a manual HCH does not have to worry about. In other words the total number of RPM used to cruise at 30 mph for any given distance will be higher in a CVT than a manual. On top of that, the number of times the IMA system kicks in for that distance will be greater in a manual than in a CVT.

So that kind of explains why CVT owners will suffer more in mpg than a manual and give the illusion that only lead foot drivers drive a CVT. When that's not the case at all.

For you CVT owners, learn to feather the throttle. This is vital for better mpg... this is not the case for manual owners. They can get away with less feathering.

 

Those numbers are horrid. You should be able to drive it like you stole it and post better MPG.

Is the car new? If not (or even if so!) bring it to mechanic to have the alignment checked. . . maybe it was in an accident and not fixed (massive toe in?). If she could post high 30's with her old civic, she knows how to drive, so its not like driving with the foot on the brake pedal.

Also, have her reset the gauge . . could be a simple matter of the dealership having test drove the car under the most terrible conditions, and she's working toward better mileage slowly.

Tire pressure was already mentioned, so check that out - put at least 35 psi all around.

Oh yeah,and release the e-brake j/k but I know someone who did this and wondered why her car was smoking from the back.

g/l

 

Hi Woodland518:

___It appears as if we might need to try and set you up with a hypermiler in and around Houston to check out your HCH? Texashchman lives near League City. Are you anywhere near there for him to take your CVT equipped HCH out for a little run in his locale? Does anyone know if Kenny lives in Texas somewhere? He might be a Californian?

___A/C is a killer in the HCH of course but in Houston, I can understand where it is an absolute necessity throughout much of the summer months

___I do want to add here that the CVT is setup quite a bit differently then the MT not only in regards to shift points but for pack longevity. You can bury an IMA pack with the manual on a whim. It is quite a bit tougher to do the same with the CVT in my limited experience.

___As for the hybrids graph groupings, the CVT based HCH has about the best “around the mean” look vs. any of the non-performance based hybrids other then maybe the Prius II? I also do not see a hypermiling tail trailing off to the right like most of the others either? I wonder why even though there are plenty of CVT based hypermiling HCH pilots in the data as shown?

HCH w/ CVT


HCH w/ MT


Prius I


Prius II


Insight w/ CVT


Insight w/ MT


___Good Luck

___Wayne R. Gerdes
___Waynegerdes@earthlink.net