Electric Vehicle Forums - Our First HCH Roadtrip (an analysis)

Last Friday, my wife and I started a 2,136 mile road trip from Colorado Springs to Minneapolis for my cousin's wedding. This was my first time taking the HCH out of the mountain states so I was pretty stoked to see what it could do on the open road. Unfortunately, with two thousand miles to drive in four days, I knew we wouldn't be able to drive as slowly as I would like. Therefore, since driving for maximum FE wasn't an option, I decided to collect as much data about the trip as I could.

My idea was to switch drivers about every 150 miles, buying gas each time we switched. I was going to drive at several different speeds, using the advanteges of the HCH to the best of my ability at each speed and log the data. My wife graciously volenteered to drive normally for the sake of comparison :). I used my mountain biking GPS to calculate the moving average of each tank, as well as the total distance and the altitude gained and lost on each segment.

However, after the first couple of segments, it became clear that inconsistancies filling up 2-3 gallons at a time at different pumps was not going to be the most scientific of experiments :). Also, it was amazing how fast the moving average of speed fell, even just by driving through a couple of towns on the highway. Worse yet, I forgot to turn off the GPS after our fastest segment, and even though the car didn't move at the hotel that night, the moving average was off-the-charts low for those miles. Even though there are known flaws with the logic and we didn't fill up as often as I originally intended, I think the data is still interesting.

This graphs shows each time we bought gas. The blue column is the actual mpg, and the yellow column is the FCD's guess about the tanks mpg. The red line is an estimate of the average speed for each tank. Note that the first couple of tanks had a large amount of altitude loss (from CO to KS), so they are pretty high.

https://www.greenhybrid.com/share/fi...NTripGraph.JPG

In terms of the actual data, here is the log we took. Normal driving would indicate my wife drove on that tank, and "hypermiling" tanks are my attempts at maximizing for the given speed. The four 300+ mile tanks were split between the two of us driving in each style, but we didn't stop for gas.

https://www.greenhybrid.com/share/fi...NTripTable.JPG

Obviously, the faster we drove, the lower the mpg. Still, the fastest segment at 75+ mph netted 43.0mpg which I was very happy about. However, that segment did have about 40 miles of driving in Badlands National Park at ~45mph. The HCH was very stable at speeds even in the high 80s, which was a first for our poor car. An interesting note: I couldn't get the glide to work above 85mph--it would kick the valves open again with any pedal pressure.

I was surprised by the amount of climbing and descending that we did, even in "flat" states like Nebraska and Iowa. The trip from Grand Island to Worthington had some of the best driving with load that I've ever driven--a true roller coaster! Still, there were a lot of really flat roads, which was more of a challenge than I thought. If you aren't pulsing and gliding, there isn't really much you can do to maximize on those segments other than fake shifting. I'll take the mountains any day :).

Overall, we managed 50.5mpg for the trip which was a lot better than I expected! We usually drive 100% interstate when we travel, but this time we took a much more direct route to Minneapolis on regular highways. The shorter distance did a lot to offset the time impact of driving slower, and fewer miles driven equals a lower overall cost--especially at a higher mpg. I would suggest that anyone considering a long trip like this should click the "shortest route" button on Mapquest and see if there is a highway route that would work for them. We could have done a lot better mileagewise if we would have taken highways home like we did on the way out instead of the interstate, but we wanted to hit the Black Hills which limited our options.

All in all, it was as fun as always to play around with the HCH. However, that amount of driving in four days is really too much, and we're both very glad to be home!