Unfortunately that is almost certainly the case. The Tesla Motors Club forum has the advantage that an actual Tesla rep will occasionally post to answer a technical question, and obviously there are people at Tesla reading that forum. I'm not sure, but I think this is also the case at the GM-Volt forum. Yes, it's pretty clear that there does need to be some forum online somewhere for the Clarity BEV and the Clarity PHEV, for Honda engineers to monitor and, where appropriate, give official responses.
I think manufacturers are less like to participate officially in non-company forums, at least because things can go very badly (nasty, trolls, conversations with no end or resolution, and flames).
Sure. Volt owners are lucky that there is an official GM-Volt forum, and Tesla car owners are lucky that Tesla allows at least one of its reps to participate in Tesla Owners Club forum discussions. No offense to Domenick or to the InsideEVs forum, but I wouldn't expect any Honda rep to participate here in that manner, nor to participate in any third-party forum. It would almost ceratinly be contrary to Honda's corporate policy.
I agree, but that begs the question - with a vehicle as new in design as the Clarity PHEV, shouldn't Honda have a closed forum just to collect information from registered owners? They definitely MUST do more than the one point in time JD Powers survey I got for my Clarity.
Honda has done owner's events, but I don't know how they have been done in the past. I see there was a Fit EV event for owners in the Bay area when they showcased their future housing project. There have also been S2000 owner events that were held at the headquarters. Somehow certain people in the company are somehow contacted for these occasions.
Yes, as a frequent reader of the TMC forum, I can attest to the fact that Tesla Reps do read that forum. Granted their participation is not frequent (probably for the very reasons Tiralc mentioned), but they do see and respond to some posts. Elon responds frequently on Twitter. It would be great if we could find a way to get some level of Honda participation here or somewhere...though I remain doubtful.
Not sure what JDP uses as their methodology. A random sample of owners will work as well as surveying every owner, and at less cost, but they need a reasonable sample size for that to be valid and reliable. At this point, it's probably not large enough. I'm sure Honda contracts with JDP for this data, and JDP probably offers different levels of surveys/services at different price points. Don't know enough about them, but they are learning about the Clarity … they just don't have any ratings yet (but they're all ready to report it when they have it): http://www.jdpower.com/cars/Honda/Clarity--Plug-In--Hybrid/2018 J.D. Power data for this year, make and model is not available at this time…
So, what you're saying is, I should pitch Honda on doing a Clarity AMA with a product specialist here, yes? It wouldn't hurt to ask, I guess.
Ask Me Anything. Basically a web chat on a specific topic with someone who would supposedly know the answers.
Ugh, I should know better than post an acronym and not write it out first. But yeah, in Reddit speak, it's Ask Me Anything, as @loomis2 said.
Cool! BTW, this forum is great. Tonight I filled up on a longer trip than usual, and my range was over 550 miles. Instead of feeling bewildered, I just said to myself oh yea, I read about that (been so long since my last fill up, almost forgot this issue). Then, grabbing a snack, I was momentarily confused when siriusXM wouldn't work, and then I thought, oh yea, press and hold the audio button. After a bit of too long a wait for the re-boot (half way through my snack), it came back on fine.
It is real. I didn't photoshop it. Seriously. OK, I know what you mean. In some ways it approaches reality. I had 778 actual miles on the car for this fill-up. And apparently, I used 5/7 of a tank to achieve it. I'm wondering if the disjuncture between the EV miles and the HV miles might be that the car's computer can't distinguish between actual EV and HV miles… though I'm sure it can. So possibly it's the programming for the event that needs to be looked into.
I see no reason why Honda can't refine the logic that goes into these calculations. Whether they'll do that or not is another question entirely and if they do, will it be applied to our model as opposed to the 2019s?