I just came home from a road trip, re-charged the Clarity, and the GOM reported an estimated EV range of 108 miles! A new personal record for me. This is, of course, completely absurd, and my next drive revealed the true range to be a more typical 50 miles, with the GOM range dropping a couple miles for each mile driven. The GOM was thrown off by the particular route and driving done during the road trip. This was a nearly 1000-mile trip home from California to Seattle. Most of the driving was done in HV-mode, and involved several climbs up and over mountain passes. After reaching the peaks of most of these passes, I would often switch to EV mode for the descent, usually gaining miles of EV range on the descent due to regeneration. The GOM seems to base its estimates on recent driving habits, and for this road trip, was surely thrown off by the hundreds of very downhill miles driven while in EV mode. Anyone else ever see an EV range on the GOM over 100 miles?
I've seen the same thing in my C-Max Energi by using a method I called "EV banking" that ends up having the same GOM results as you. While using HV mode on highway drives with some EV miles left in the battery, I would switch over to EV mode as I regen down from highway speeds to stops. I then switch back to HV mode when moving away from the stop and return to highway speeds. On this Ford, this moves the SOC reference point for HV mode up a few percentages each time and I slowly build some EV miles back into the battery (good for about 3-4 miles on a 50 mile trip with several stops). I've seen as high as 40 miles estimated (EPA is 19) the next morning! Yeah, that ain't right..... I haven't tried this method with the Clarity yet to see if it will allow EV banking but I see no reason why it would not. Basically that is what the hills did for you.
Interesting result... This is an example where the GOM algorithm may fall a little flat. It makes perfect sense to include recent experience in the calculation, but there should be something to constrain this from going so far towards an unrealistic condition. For instance, maybe it should never report an estimate that exceeds what the vehicle could possibly do while driving on flat terrain. Of course, you were intentionally playing with the car in your scenario. I wonder what would have happened if you simply driven that route in HV mode and didn't do any switching back and forth... The downhill stretches probably would still have created just as much regeneration. But, maybe this would not have been "booked" as ridiculously efficient EV miles because you were in HV mode. Overall, for the whole trip, it would be interesting to know if your switching back and forth bought you anything in terms of net efficiency (total energy input... (kWh + gas) vs. miles traveled).
