Considering Clarity, 200 mile commute

The reality is that the car has actually averaged about 40mpg over the past 7500 miles.

We aren’t being honest with ourselves or others if we claim to have achieved 110 or 2500 miles per gallon. Counting the miles traveled while using electricity as miles traveled using gasoline produces a meaningless statistic.

 

The entire reason i bought the car my electricity rates are much cheaper han just putting gas. On off peak i pay about about 4 cents per kilowatt hour. So about 60 cents to drive 45 miles around town. So it is a valid stat but obviously not actual mpg in hv mode.

 

How does explaining your cost for electricity make your mpg statement valid?

You’re combining miles traveled using 2 fuels, or sources of energy, and stating that you are traveling those miles using just one of those sources. The cost of either fuel is irrelevant.

Let’s look at this from a different angle.
I’ve driven the Clarity 700 miles in a single day on several occasions. Typically, the battery gauge will lose about 4 bars on the entire trip while driving in HV. Each bar represents about .75kWh of stored energy, so the car used 3kWh’s to travel 700 miles. Is it valid to say that the car got 233 miles per kWh on that trip?

 

@Landshark, let's say that we get 40 mpg on gas and that we drive half of our miles on electricity. If electricity is free, then that has the same fuel cost as a purely gasoline car that got 80 mpg. If electricity costs 33% per mile as gasoline, then this calculation becomes 60 mpg equivalent for a fully gasoline car. I think this is all that @neal adkins was trying to portray. I tend to think about it like this some of the time since the majority of my electricity to charge the car is at my work and has no direct cost to me.

 

Let’s say the gas is free. Your neighbor keeps a 300 gallon tank of gas for emergency use and rotates the fuel annually. He’s just offered 50 gallons to you at no cost. Now what happens to the calculation?

I’ll reiterate, the cost of either fuel is irrelevant. The car gets about 40mpg and 3 miles per kWh. The rest is just mental masturbation.

 

We're not teaching a physics/chemistry class here. The only thing about mpg that matters much to me is the cost of the fuel. If gasoline were free, then I wouldn't care a lot what my mpg was. Getting electricity at no cost drives me toward that end. That's the only concept being presented here. No one is arguing that the efficiency of the car magically increases.

 

Carry on then. I certainly didn’t intend to challenge anyone’s ability to understand something simple.

 

Thank you @Landshark . I am truly blessed to have experienced your deep understanding, acceptance, and humility.

 

You’ll miss me when I’m gone.

 

Im quite enjoying passing all the gas stations and seeing the now 111 mpg on my dash screen.

 

Sadly, the display won’t show anything higher than 199.9, so I can’t convince my college professor friends that I’m getting 2500mpg.

 

If you can charge at work then buy it. If you can't, just get a regular hybrid. The accord hybrid is a pretty nice car for a long commute.

I hated driving the clarity after the battery is depleted, you're moving a 4k pound car with a tiny 4 cylinder engine.

I no longer own the clarity, I loved it for my commute (20 miles each way with heavy traffic) but there's no way I would've bought it for long distance driving.

 

The OP appears to have left the building. However, I think my Clarity is a great long-distance cruiser in HV mode. It's easy to avoid depleting the battery--well, easy if you cover the Drive button with a piece of paper that reminds you to switch on HV when you get back in the car. I made this image to print and tape over the D button when I'm burning gasoline:

 

Just send a pic of the 199.9...and we'll believe you

 

If Landshark posted that pic, not all of us would believe that he's getting 2500 mpg. Disclaimer: As a university professor, I feel obligated to support Landshark's professor friends. ;-)

 

I may need to find more gullible friends.