My first long drive (about 2700 miles)

My wife and I did a road trip with the new car (2018 Clarity purchased late Sept 2018). Quick summary was that the car performed great, but some specific observations follow:
- We didn't have access to charging at all. I've found long-press HV is my friend, and it even works when driving through rolling hills.
- The highways we went on between Eugene, OR and Tucson AZ were mostly windy, and as such the lane assist stuff mostly just stayed turned off. I have had good experience with it on straight interstate, but just not for this trip.
- I like using mostly sport mode to get the adaptive cruise control to catch up faster. Still, in heavy city traffic I just drive manually (i.e. driving through Phoenix).
- The trip for us was two days driving down, then two days driving back. I find the 7 gallon tank a bit limiting. For the 4000lbs car, I might of preferred to drive around with say 12 gallons of gas or even 10. Realize this means much of the time in town you're just carrying extra weight, but the range is lower than my last car by about 160 miles per tank even though much better per-gallon mileage.
- Never got angry bees. I attached a sticky note "HV?" to the drive button and used HV the whole way. When EV got low (which my car does), I just learned to use HV long press. My Clarity is much happier to always have non-zero EV range. I slowly lose EV range even in HV mode.
- Even over multiple passes, the car makes a normal sound when working hard. I do see EV range go down over passes then mostly recovers.
- I bought a 1 year to satellite radio (and the music programming works OK for my taste other than being repetitive) but it was really nice to have commercial free music on the long trip.
- The Garmin map and google disagreed fairly frequently about how to do my route, so I favored google when they did disagree.
- The service minder came on for my A1 on the first day, leaving my home state. I cleared it. I've since learned the 'info' button can temporarily disable the message.

It's hard to say all I learned "living in the car" for days, but the more I drive it, the more I like it. I really love this car. I find the car has plenty of power even when already traveling at 60+ MPH. I frequently found myself on two-lane roads, and passing folks as needed. The car got to 100MPH without issue while passing. I really don't understand folks who say its gutless. It's definitely the most powerful car I've owned in years. The only more powerful car I owned was years ago (V8, 1967 Plymouth Fury III- it was a brick, but it had power).

I kept the gas receipts but haven't calculated mileage yet.

-Dan

 

I wasn't trying to find out top speed. I was averaging about 80 mph in very remote areas mostly without traffic of any kind. Occassionally I'd pass someone and I hit 100 exactly on more than one occasion while passing. I don't honestly know how much more the car can do. It didn't seem to have any problems accelerating at high speeds. i.e. going from 80 to 100 was really peppy and didn't lag at all.

This car's power really surprises me. When I got the good gas-mileage vehicle, I thought it will be gutless. I found out quickly that's not the case. Then I thought, well the car has great power at low speeds but will be gutless at highway speeds. Again, not true. The car has plenty of power for any use I have for it.

EDIT: I edited my original post to say I hit 100 exactly instead of 'exceeded' it. I know for sure I saw 100 while passing but I do not recall if I exceeded it. Sorry, didn't mean to exaggerate, and my point wasn't to say top speed, but more that acceleration works great including at highway speeds.