We bought our Camry Hybrid last year and love the car. However we do not get good city gas mileage. City mileage averages 24 mpg. Highway mileage averages 36 mpg. We baby the car during starts and stops. We have taken the car back to the dealership and they claim everything is working correctly and with additional mileage on the car the mpg will improve. After 7 months it is still exactly the same city mileage.

Any ideas?

 

I found that babying the car doesn't really help. Just drive it. Long slow accelerations actually use more fuel.

 

As mentioned above don't baby the car...get up to speed at a moderate pace and then use the techniques outlined all over the place in this forum...the search function is your friend

 

I found that my mileage increased when I stopped worrying about it so much. Last 4-5 tanks have averaged 40-42 mpg (calculated). Enjoy your car....

 

Short 5 minute trips?

Live in Fairbanks, AK?

Either can effect city mileage significantly. (Unless you are jackrabbiting and slamming on the brakes every block). Trip length and temperature are much bigger factors.

 

Yes, I agree, don't baby the gas pedal. Try to think about it as how much "time" you spend accelerating. Doing a 20 second slow accel to 40mph is going to be a lot worse than a moderately quick 10 second accel to 40mph. You want to spend as much time as possible cruising or coasting! So get up to speed quickly without going nuts, then maximize cruising and coasting (but that doesn't mean more braking if you can avoid it).

If the guy in front of you pulls away slowly from red lights or stop signs, let him get a few seconds in front of you before starting so you don't have to lolligag behind him.

 

Droid13 — One's trip average FE (in L/100 km in the metric TCH) will be lowest if the distance-averaged (not the time-averaged) value of the instantaneous FE gauge reading is the lowest possible. This means, for example, that an instantaneous FE reading of 10 L/100 km for 1 km of distance travelled contributes to the overall trip FE the same amount as an instantaneous FE reading of 5 L/100 km for 2 km of distance travelled. It's not easy to optimize this in practice, however, but this is what one would have to do in order to use the least fuel for a given trip. There's no equivalent statement that can be made regarding how to optimize FE using the gauge (in mpg) in the US TCH, due to its reciprocal relation to fuel consumption.

Stan

 

**** that's hard to parse, SPL!
And I'm an engineer...

 

Absolutely I agree. Since FE calculations involve volume and distance, time and speed are actually completely irrelevent mathematically. However, in typical city driving accelerating from stop signs and lights, time also ends up being roughly comparible to distance. I thought it would be easier to comprehend, but now that you've challenged my feeble math skills ...

It would have been more correct for me to suggest that I believe that accerating to speed in x distance and cruising for 2x distance is usually better than accelerating to the same speed over the equivalent 3x distance.

For example, accelerating steadily for 3km (works the same for shorter distances too, easier numbers to read) at a rate of 20L/100km (11.7mpg) will use 0.6L of fuel. If you decide to accelerate to the same speed in a third the distance (1km) and cruise for the remaining 2km at 6L/100km (39.2mpg) (the cruise would use 0.12L of fuel) then as long as you used less than .48L of fuel to accelerate in that first 1km (48L/100K or 4.9mpg) you would be more efficient. Sounds quite doable to me. Even assuming the slow steady accelerating only registered 10L/100km (23.5mpg which is almost what dlbrrb is getting for total FE) that would still leave a consumption up to 18L/100km (13mpg) to be allowed for the quicker, shorter acceleration to still be more efficient.

 

This is the nightmare of the uphill that greets me on the way home. I work hard and fight for every notch on my trip FE display to get it to the max 5.8L/100km reading just before the hill before my house. It's only uphill for about 45 seconds at 60kph but I'm lucky if the trip FE stays in the 6s (third bar on the MFD FE trip graph) by the end.