Heading to Mammoth Mountain from the Bay Area

I am going to Mammoth Mountain via Lake Tahoe later today. If you don't hear from me in a couple of days I am probably stranded somewhere with engine failure or something!

I will report back if I make it. LOL!

 

This is my first long road trip and involves several +8000 ft passes, so I am curious to see how the car performs.

 

So to give a short report, we made it on time last night. I used HV for 95% of the time and the car didn’t loose much battery charge. The echo summit pass on US50 (just before Lake Tahoe) and Luther pass on 89 were both ok, the engine was not straining. These are both 7000+ ft and I was doing 65mph to 70 mph at some sections. The Monitor pass on 89 was a different story (steeper grades I guess) and I was doing 35 to 40 mph (it is a slower road) and engine was running much harder/noisier, to a point where my wife thought something might be wrong. Then there was the section on 395 which is all elevated (around 7000 ft) and the pass around Bridgeport, again I did 55-70 mph and the engine was running hard but not like the the Monitor pass. I am not sure if there was a headwind, but for some reason the engine was working harder than the similar conditions on US50. If I was in a high powered ICE car probably I would have gone 5 mph faster in this 100 mile section.

Finally if we had a Tesla, I don’t think we could have done this trip at this time of the day (we got there at 1 am). So overall I would say the car performed well for such a difficult route, but it is not something that suits this type of car, and if I were Honda I would put a 2 liter engine in this car.

 

I think you can charge in mammoth and along the road, but it is not something that you want to do at 11pm, when you have to drive another 3 hours. I just filled up once (5.5 gallons or so) and I had 2/3 battery and 1/3 gas when I got to mammoth.

 

Yes, a turbo engine works better in high elevations, but that will add another layer of complexity. A 2L engine won’t cost more or weigh much more than the current 1.5 engine.

 

I think a 1.5L engine could work well if the car had a smart navigation-aided power train management. For example if I could enter the route in HondaLink app and tell them that I want to get there with 30% battery charge, then the car could have used 40% additional battery charge for the most demanding sectors. The calculations can be done on a server and results transferred to the app. This is something that can be done with existing power train, but needs some software expertise that Japanese car companies are reluctant to do.

I wonder if 1.5l engine is partially dictated by tax schemes in Japan, because sub 1500cc engines are taxed differently in that country.

 

So to wrap this report up, we drove back yesterday and since we were losing 7000 ft of elevation, it was an easier trip. We started with about 90% charge (I charged in the hotel the day before.) The first episode of high revs was the pass after Mono Lake before Bridgeport, the engine was running relatively high and my wife driving in HV mode, she slowed down a bit to about 50 mph to avoid very high revs. This was a relatively short climb. Then it was easy sailing until Carson Valley, where we took Nevada SR-207 to climb from Mottsville (El. 4700 ft.) to Daggitt pass (El. 7339 ft) in about 8 miles. This is a steep road with 6-7% average gradient for about 8 miles. Here the engine was again running high and we drove about 40 mph, it was not very pleasant but it also didn't feel like the engine blowing up.

One thing that I noticed during these steep runs was that when we stopped there was some sort of clutch smell. Not sure if this is the direct drive clutch or some other mechanism, but I noticed twice.

Last data point, from South Lake Tahoe we had just one climb left, so I used EV sport mode and climbed from Meyers in Lake Tahoe basin (about 6350 ft) to Echo Summit (7377 ft). The car had much more pep here and my EV range dropped from 37 miles to about 21 miles during this climb (from about 70% to 50%).

So I think if you are driving just one or two steep grades, it is a viable option to use EV sport mode and some battery charge to reduce the strain on the engine.

If I was going to do this trip again, I would use EV sport for some of the climbs and I will also use HV charge mode to regain battery charge during easier and downhill sections of the road.