the sad part about this, is most likely he will win. i mean you are talking about a country where your own stupidity can win you a lawsuit... hot coffee anybody?

 

There's absolutely no way this guy wins his suit. This has been tried before with the EPA test winning.

Because the EPA test is ACTUALLY DONE and the car ACTUALLY ACHIEVES those numbers in the lab and the EPA sticker declares the number AN ESTIMATE, there is no way to win a suit like this.

If the sticker said "you are guaranteed to get zz MPG" then he would have a case.

And because Honda can produce drivers with a car just like his who DO get EPA numbers or better (all they need to do is shop here for witnesses) then, well, this is just another frivolous, baseless lawsuit which will likely be dismissed before it ever gets to trial.

I could take that dudes car right now and get EPA on his commute, as many of us around here could.

 

Perhaps, perhaps not. I live in SoCal, Beverly Hills to be exact. Within a 10 mile radius are 4 of the top ten worst highway bottlenecks in the country.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0931285.html

Driving on the city streets is even worse. A recent 6 mile drive from Santa Monica to my home, during rush hour, took more than an hour and a half. If I remember correctly, the car averaged about 20mpg on that delightful jaunt.

I have logged over 15000 miles with 32 tanks that are logged in the database. The worst tank was 33.3 and the best was 55.6 with an overall average of 44.7mpg. I am very pleased with the results and have used all the tricks and driving strategies to achieve this average, but, it is not close to the old EPA mpg numbers.

If he has a brutal commute, and knowing the traffic conditions here in SoCal, I can easily see how he managed to get such low MPG.

 

Which one of you readers with a 50+mpg average Civic would like to put your money where your mouth is?

I have a clean 2005 Honda Civic Hybrid with just over 20K miles, well maintained by the dealer in excellent condition that I would like to trade for one that works. I have been tracking this car's mileage on GreenHybrid.com for about two years now, and it averages 32 - 34 mpg. So if you think it's the driver and not the car then let's trade.

For a while I thought that city driving might be the problem with this vehicle, so I took it out to flat West Texas and drove a full tank of gas at optimal conditions: no air-conditioning, constant 60 mph, slightly overinflated tires, mainly smooth tar roads with only small stretches of rough-tar. The resulting best-ever tank for this car was 40 mpg. The worst ever tank was 29 mpg driving with air conditioning on in city traffic.

I took printouts of charts from GreenHybrid to the dealer and explained the problem. The service manager refused to look at the car and told me, "There is a two year break-in period on these hybrids. You may not get good mileage until then." In other words, "Get lost until your warantee expires, chump." I will probably never buy another Honda.

I'm not looking for a jury award. I just want good mileage, so if you're confident that all Civic Hybrids are created equal, trade me. Would prefer to trade for a 2005 Prius

 

might as well trade my bmw m5. Seems like a fair trade.

Sarcasm aside, Have you tried a different dealership?

 

It is interesting that you have a documented your car here for most of its life (BTW, your note for the 40mpg tank mentiones 70mph, not 60mph). Your commute sounds pretty tough for any car though--what were you driving before the HCH and what kind of mileage were you getting?

I would be pretty interested to read about a swap if there was anyone with good HCHI experience in the Austin area. Can someone with high mileage turn good numbers in your car with your commute? With their car on your commute?

 

Highbred,
One other thing I noticed with your car, you do not drive very much. You average less than 100 miles per week. I'm not saying that your car does not have issues, but part of it is likely due to your short commute. Your car doesn't get much of an opportunity to run in an efficient state.

Also, what pressure are your tires at?

 

That service manager is so full of horse $#!7 I wish I could smack him/her upside the head and shove it in a barrel of used motor oil. Break-in rarely takes more than a couple thousand miles (most folks here notice it in the 3k-5k range), not two years. I'd love to take you up on your challenge, but being about 1300mi away makes that a little difficult.

So... try describing your daily drive. Every little detail, how far, how fast, how quickly you accelerate. Stoplights, railroad crossings, everything. There's a good chance someone else here has a similar drive, or can find a way to replicate it.

 

My commute is short, about 5 miles each way through the city. It is stop and go most of the way, probably averaging three or four blocks between stops.

I'm not a lead-foot, but this is Texas, so I have the air conditioning running about six months of the year, which seems to make about difference of three or four miles per gallon. I take care to keep the tires inflated. I tried premium gasoline once to see if it would make a difference -- I didn't see any difference, so I use regular unleaded.

My last car was a 4 cylinder Camry, which got about 22 mpg on the same commute. So on the bright side I am getting 50% better mileage in the Civic. On the down side, my car is in the bottom 2% of Civics on this site.

There is something strange about the TRIP A / TRIP B meters in this car, so I would appreciate your observations/comparisons. The TRIP meter often says this car is getting 40 - 50 mpg for the first 60 miles or so. Then between 60 and 100 miles, it always starts to drop off and continues to drop until the tank is almost empty and the TRIP meter reads abound 32 mpg. When I enter mileage into GreenHybrid I always use the miles / gallons and that seems to correspond with the ending MPG reading on the dash. This seems to indicate that there are two sensors on the car; one sensor in the fuel line that gives immediate feedback, and one in the tank that's tied to the odometer. So my car's fuel line sensor is wrong. Would this affect the onboard computer?

 

This is curious, and perhaps kenny (who had an '04 before his current '06) can shed some light on it, but I don't recall ever seeing this problem in my '06. There may be two separate sensors, but that would be a screwy way of doing things. If you calculate mpg by hand (miles driven versus fuel pumped back in), do you match the odometer sensor? Sounds like you do, but let's be sure. In all honesty, that five-mile commute is the real killer here, even moreso than living in Texas and using the a/c. The car never gets a chance to get up to a decent operating temperature, and I wouldn't be surprised if you're getting forced regen rather frequently as well because of the scarcity of recharge opportunities.

I honestly think the better car for you, assuming you'd fit, would be a plug-in Prius (it's an aftermarket modification), or a pure electric like the Chevy Volt. Honda's IMA system puts up some stunning numbers when you've got open road in the 45-55mph range, but for city driving, Toyota's HSD w/Atkinson ICE appears to be the winner.