I can average 39.2mpg at 62mph CC @ 75F. Road is pretty darn flat with some tiny ups and downs here and there. No Wind. This is with 3/4 of the tank filled and I myself weigh about 218 lbs - theres absolutely nothing else in the car (I travel as light as possible). I have found that at 60MPH cruise the car does slightly worse than at 62 (or my spedometer is really that far off...) and at 65 its a whole 1.5 MPG lower. Go up to 70, and MPGs drop to about 35. Never tried a test with under 60 as I am afraid that some angry driver will shoot me (literally, it does happen here in Cali...)

 

I too am concerned about being shot, have considered tinting my windows. Today I filled my tank and noticed that my mileage range read 721 miles to empty. I don't recall it ever being that high. I used valero gas for the first time, but as you probably read in some of my posts, i believe that gas comes from the same place therefore it should not be different no matter which station you purchase from. Here in Jersey it comes in at Elizabeth Port and is refined in Elizabeth and distributed to various stations. One of the reasons I believe it has been inexpensive in NJ is because the transport from the refinery is so close. Unlike the huge trek to deliver to upstate NY or other. What kind of numbers do you get when you fill up on the mileage to empty read out???

 

Mine starts at around 650, which seems to be almost correct when counting the extra 2 gallons in the tank that the computer doesn't know about (you know the whole discrepancy of using toyota software which thinks that tank is 18 gallons vs the real 20 in the altima hybrid. LOL)

Also I have noticed that the miles range gets affected by the MPG readout. If I don't reset it it will show me slightly higher numbers, and after resetting it it will just default to some range assuming 35mpg.

Another thing is that as I drive the range keeps moving down AND up kinda sporadically so I only trust the first digit in that readout (the hundrets).

 

I do reset at each fill up. After fill up, i start car, then reset everything before I leave the bay. I guess the computer takes my previous mpg and estimates the mileage range from that. I will try to reset when i first pull into the station before i turn off the engine, then fill up and see what the readout gives. Right now my mpg readout is at 47 mpg that equates to 940 miles. I doubt I can even get to 800 and don't know if I can take the stress and worry of becoming stranded. As far as the range going up and down, I noticed that in the city the range continually goes down and sometimes the mpg readout goes up, once on the highway the range starts going up and the mpg readout goes down. Kind of strange??

 

It is a little odd I guess... Though with 47mpg (assuming around 43ish hand calculated) you should easily break 800 miles on a 20 gallon tank. Remmeber that your car has an extra 2 gallons that the software doesn't know about :-)

Mine tends to be the reverse... It will go down fast on highway (the miles remaining) and climb in the city. It does seem to be linked with the current MPGs, at least thats what I can observe with mine. Might be just pure luck as I have only paid attention to the miles remaining about 7 times since I bought the car.

 

For a little spice, once in a while I will only view the miles range display for a whole tank. It is a good goal to shoot for (max miles per tank) Do you have a definite understanding as to why the hand calculations only match the display occasionally and / or why they tend to always be less than the mpg computer display?

 

That came up a while back on one of the threads. Mostly everyone seemed to be converging to errors in the reporting of the mileage by the car, though I think if thats really the case some people would be seeing the reverse (lower computer calculated than hand-calculated). I really don't have an answer as to why that is so, but I have observed that its consistently overreporting by about the same amount and also a lot of other cars (different models, not necessarily hybrids only) also tend to overreport MPGs.

Perhaps more gasoline slips through to the engine than the meter detects?

 

From the prior discussion, there were a few people whose MPG display read consistently low, but most were high.

On my car, the odometer is about 2.5% low (by highway survey markers), and the MPG display averages 7% higher than hand calculation (over more than 10 tanks). Those two calibration errors partially cancel out, so the MPG display is really about 4% high overall. I really don't expect the instruments to be any better calibrated than that, so there's no great mystery.

That said, I still think the MPG display is far more reliable than the hand calculation on any one tank. There's a lot of "noise" in my hand calculated numbers, depending on just how well I topped off the last tank.

 

BEST TANK LOG added to http://www.thespoils.8m.com/photo2.html

 

2 questions:

1. How did you get your car into EV mode while still cold (the blue led)?
2. Strangely your tank level is dead the same as mine for the same miles driven, though I tend to get far less MPGs than you (hand calculated ~ 36) (computer 39.2). When my tank level is dead halfway, I have traveled around 350-360 miles. How about you?