I built/modified/made and intake which helped a lot but what about the exhaust/other? Anyone else tried anything to improve power/mileage?
Clif

 

Not me. I've moded my car to do the opposite. Added weight, and lots of electronics to force the car to have to work harder to keep up.

 

Keep up with what? Mine can't out run a butterfly as it is I cannot imagine it any slower.
Little old ladies are even giving me the finger.
Clif

 

keep up with the electrical and power demands.

Mine isn't realy slow. I notice I get a realy good start off the line at stop lights. I'm up to 30 by the time the car behind me is through.

But if you are looking for a pocket rocket then you may have difficulty acheiving that.

 

I realize it is a slow POS but when I bought it I wasn't aware it couldn't go up a hill without downshifting two gears then it still loses a lot of speed. Thing is if I lived somewhere flat I would be super happy with mileage and power but they don't call this area Hill Country for nothing.
My intake helped my daily commutes biggest hill by reducing my speed loss from 6-9mph to 1-2mph but I want more. Like just about everything built these days it can be made better, question is how.

 

Well, according to 7thgencivic.com most bolt ons on the regular civics are useless. I would suspect thats the same for they hybrid as well.

You could get a turbo and slap it on. But that would be a custom job (I'm sure you know all about that if you made your own intake) and would probably cost $3K to $4K

 

Thats true about the turbo, this engine (atleast the 3 cylinder version in the insight) responds very well to light amounts of boost. There has also been word that a exhaust mod helps with power and getting into lean burn.

 

Ooh tell me more about the exhaust mod. We talking fat pipe or headers or both? I have been thinking about a full exhaust swap, bigger is better.

 

I think in the insight they were putting in 2 1/2 pipes instead of 2" like stock. They were only replacing it behind the second Cat though, and then they had a different muffler, though i cant remember what. i dont think a full swap would work well with the hybrid system as you would need to replace the specialized cats as well to prevent bottnecks

 

I was under the impression no one made a header for the hybrid because of the close-coupled catalyst? Has anyone seen one? I know with my HX, there's no header available since it basically goes right from the cylinder head into the catalyst. Typically with all the SOHC Civics though, you'll see a good improvement from an intake but the exhaust rarely makes a difference. A header helps on some models, but like I said, I don't think anyone makes one that would fit the hybrid, unless they went to an underbody cat rather than a close-coupled one.