Will the Clarity work for long commuters like me?

Used to have a 30 mile (each way) commute done in a Prius Plug-in. Used about a gallon of gas a day - the MPGe was about 62. 85% freeway at various speeds, though much faster in the AM than the PM. In the Clarity, same trip, same conditions (though not doing the commute every day anymore), I probably use less than half a gallon of gas for the trip. It's 800ft to sea level and back again. Far southwest corner - the traffic here is getting as bad as yours, though - so pretty much similar conditions.

For longer trips, we take the Tesla, but I may take the Clarity next time just to get some data. There are others who've posted positive results from their road voyages.

 

Would you compare the comfort of your Clarity vs. your Tesla for us? Do you take the Tesla because it's more comfortable or just to drive by more gas stations?

Edit: Or is the Tesla's astounding acceleration the reason you choose it first?

 

My commute is similar- 24 miles each way three days a week, and 45 miles each way (including a steep climb) two days a week. Both are almost all highway at ~75. A charge is just enough to do my shorter commute all on EV, but any errands or side trips make it over range. When I had only the shorter commute, I was going about 1000 miles per month and using about 5.5 gallons of gas per month.

On the longer commute, there is a 1000 ft climb over a a couple miles. On those days, I switch to HV as soon as I get on the freeway, and maintaining speed up the pass consumes a number of EV miles with the battery supplementing the engine. On the way home, I do the same but switch back to EV trying to match my range to arriving home.

 

I was also confused about that I tried to say too, so waited my wife and the car back to try those buttons again.

From my experience, turning off ECON mode will make ICE kick in easier, it will switch between EV and HV mode depending on how you accelerate. It's more like regular hybrid.
While in manual HV mode, it's using ICE to maintain the battery charge.
Since I think you will still have enough battery when you need without using HV mode manually, you can just turn off ECON mode and let the car to do the work.
But if you prefer manually switch to HV mode, you might get a bit better efficiency.

 

On some days, I drive close to 200 miles in my Clarity.

With a fully charged battery to start my day, it's never been a problem. If I know that I'll be driving a ton that day, I automatically engage the HV mode once I'm on the freeway. The ICE coming on is almost imperceptible, and the car is joy to drive and manages to not deplete the battery completely.

If you never plug in the car, I would say it could be rather unpleasant. I always thought Clarity on an empty battery is no fun to drive, as the ICE struggles to handle everything. Having owned a Prius previously, I would say Prius drives better than Clarity on an empty battery.

Don't get me wrong: Clarity is a much nicer car than any Prius in my opinion. But if your plan is to never plug the car in, there might be better choices...

 

FYI, when you turn off ECON Mode, you're in NORMAL Mode, a drive mode without its own button, or any instrument panel indicator. HV Charge Mode is the other mode that doesn't get its own button, but it gets a "CHARGE" indicator on the instrument panel.

If you turn off the Clarity PHEV when in SPORT Mode, it will be in NORMAL Mode when you next power up the car. Like SPORT Mode, HV Mode and HV Charge Mode do not remain in effect after you turn off the car. I wish HV Mode would persist because that would make it easier to preserve the battery charge.

 

I have to disagree here. I run my car on “forced HV” mode the large majority of the time (lobbying my office and apartment complex to install chargers, but that’s for another post). Ignoring the engine noise, the car handles exactly the same as it does in pure EV or “manual HV”. The only thing I’ve noticed is that at times the ICE will maintain a higher rev than normal, but I suspect this is because the battery has dropped to ~7 or 8%, and the car wants to get back to 10%

I’ve never experienced the “angry bees” nor have I seen a lack of power even on hills, though admittedly I haven’t had the chance to try a very steep incline with no battery. I’m honestly confused at the reports of low power when running with two bars of battery. Is there that much variance between individual Clarities? Maybe it’s the way we’re driving them or where we live?


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I’m in your area. I drive from Lancaster to Burbank, 135 miles round trip everyday. Im at 5000 miles and the long drive isn’t bad, but it is best to charge on both ends. The ride down isnt too bad on just engine power, but going up is noisy if you are not charged. The 14 freeway has a pretty steep grade and I save my charge for that climb which goes great on battery power. Even on engine power only it goes just fine, just noisy. Charging on both sides has yielded me 140mpg and about 80mpg average for both when you work in the cost of charging.

So the biggest advice is to learn what mode to use at what time to maximize your power and mpg. I love that this car gives you options, and the regeneration paddles help save on braking. I’m tall, so the Prius wasn’t and option. The Niro is underpowered as reported by two of my friends that have them and tell me it’s hard to go 70 over the pass. I can easily do 75-80 up the pass, the generator just gets loud on gas only. It’s completely silent on battery power.

 

My usage is almost similar to yours.

I drive 40 miles one way, and plug in to my 120 V at work. it charges to almost full while i am done with my work day. So far i have put in 20 dollars worth of gas with about 4.7K miles. I go easy on the pedal most of the times and coast quite a bit while using regen braking whereever possible to get that extra mileage.

Typically my drive is touch and go on the freeway - which while on regen braking adds about 6 miles on my one way trip.

 

I’ve argued exactly this before and been told I don’t know what I’m talking about. The Clarity goes into forced HV mode once the battery drops to 12%. At that point the battery hovers between 8 - 10%. I suspect on a long steep incline there will be a point where the vehicle determines it can’t use any more of the battery to supplement the ICE’s generator output (to keep it from getting down to a level that is harmful to the battery) and the vehicle would have much less power. In this case you would definitely be hearing the angry bees while the ICE is essentially maxed out for the generator to provide the maximum power possible to push the vehicle and try to add any residual power back into the battery. However, I can’t imagine Honda designed it to hurt the battery if people choose to drive it as a traditional hybrid for extended periods of time. This vehicle was designed for people to just drive it and not have to think about switching modes all the time.

 

That could be it. I’ve also wondered if it might be that the engine is already clutched directly to the wheels at highway speeds, and the car’s just not smart enough to figure out that it’s at a steep incline and needs to switch back to a series arrangement for the extra power. I need to go find some long hills and experience this for myself.




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The Clarity’s Atkinson cycle engine lacks much torque so I suspect the engine would disengage from pushing the wheels and solely power the generator. Even if the electric engine is being powered by only the generator it still has much more torque than the ICE can provide by directly engaging the wheels (and engaging the wheels would limit the RPM’s of the ICE which would further limit the power output of the generator).

 

I agree on all counts, but something’s not working right for the car to be struggling on hills (reportedly). Maybe the ICE can’t generate sufficient power to meet the demands of the motor on the hill?

Edit: nvmd, you edited your first comment and I agree. I think the consensus is that in HV Mode on a hill, the car is driven by the electric motor with energy supplied by a combination of battery power and power from the generator. At some point, the battery depletes to the point where it’s just the ICE powering the generator powering the motor, which will cause sluggish performance on the hill.


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The HV mode on the Clarity allows the ICE to directly power the car at speeds over about 45mph. There is a clutch in the transmission and when you go over this speed, the clutch engages to supply power directly to the wheels (and as necessary, run the generator to replenish energy needed to run the electrical and environmental system in the car). Below about 45mph, the clutch disengages and the electric motor moves the car and the ICE runs at low speed to keep the battery at about the same level it was at when you turn on EV mode.

This means that if you are going to go a longer distance than the battery alone can take you, the strategy to use would be to use EV mode to get on to the freeway and maybe complete some of the trip in HV mode. The ICE will actually do most of the work with the ICE coming on and off in the background to keep the batteries from draining past the level that they were when you entered into HV mode. It has to do this to prevent the environment and electrical systems from running down the battery. When you have preserved enough battery to complete the remainder of the trip, you can press the HV button again to go back to EV mode.

For a commute, you would probably want to spend at least some small amount of time in HV mode if you wanted to avoid a situation where the batteries depleted so much that the ICE would have to run at high speed (angry bees) to run the systems and drive the car because again, the ICE only turns on at speeds above about 45 mph.

The right strategy then would be to look for a part of the trip where the ICE was going to not have to work very hard like flat stretches or lower speed limits (but above 45 mph) and select HV mode for that part of the drive, then press the HV mode button again when you were past this part of the trip. This might mean that on your commute you might use a quarter of a gallon of gas total for a 50 mile trip and still preserve a couple of bars for traffic delays or something. Keeping five or six bars on the battery gauge means you are less likely to get into a position where the ICE has to rev high.

Now remember, the car will go into HV mode on its own if the battery is allowed to run down and you could complete your trip in that mode, but when the battery only has two bars left, the ICE is going to come on a lot and rev because now it has to move the car below 45mph and it will have to drive the car above 45mph through the clutch AND provide additional power to the traction motor for acceleration AND provide power to offset the electrical and environment system drain. This is when you hear the Angry Bees. Thinking ahead and engaging HV mode to preserve some battery will keep you from every hearing the ICE intruding into the cabin.

Rememeber, in HV mode, the ICE only powers the wheels when you are running over about 45 mph. The rest of the time, the ICE will be running on and off in the background to keep the battery at the charge level it was at when you enter HV mode. If you listen for it, you might hear the ICE coming on and off but because current demand is very minor at speeds below 45 mph, the ICE does not have to rev much over idle to keep the batteries from loosing charge. If you have done any hypermileing, you can probably get 55

 

As for the angry bees (a term that I just don't really like, but hey, I will go with it), when I drove my Gen 3 Prius up steep hills, the eCVT would go to a very very low ratio and the racket was pretty intense. I have not had the Clarity so far make as much noise as I routinely heard in the Prius when going up steep hills.

There is a very steep hill on my way to the location I go to for astronomy. Vertical rise is probably 400 feet and the grade is very steep. If I entered that grade a 55mph (the speed limit on that road) in the Prius, by the time I was a quarter way up it, the Prius engine was spinning like mad to try to maintain speed. It was very annoying and even with the pedal to the floor, the car struggled to maintain speed going up that hill. Attempting to accelerate on that stretch made for even more noise with almost no real difference in velocity.

On the first trip up in the Clarity (with about 80% charge) the difference was night and day. The ICE did not even have to come on. The amazing torque of the traction motor in the Clarity just allowed it to claw its way up without even seeming to try. What a difference!

The key to getting up a hill in the Clarity is to have battery charge sufficient for the climb. That may not prevent the ICE from coming on. My guess is that the ICE will still fire up if the drain on the batteries is high enough to put them in a high temp range, but having climbed a lot of hills in my Prius and living with the straining sound of the engine, I can't hardly believe that the Clarity will be worse than the Prius on most hills as long as the battery is not near depletion.

The high revolutions we hear from these kinds of cars is in fact simply a by product of small engines and CVTs. The Clarity is not the only Hybrid that suffers from this behavior.

 

Eddgie, I completely agree--that the performance suffers when the battery runs down---but I am starting to wonder if we are wrong, at least some of the time.

There is a vocal minority (e.g. UnChecked Exception, and ManKo, above) that claims that when one does what I/they will call "forced HV"---the battery falls to 2 bars, and the car switches to HV mode--that it in fact performs just fine. These drivers do this all the time, so I respect what they have to say. Another writer said that his wife drove it 200 miles, never put it in HV mode (including several mountain passes), never noticed anything.

I assiduously avoid "forced HV" because the one angry bees I heard was when driving an (uncharged) dealer's vehicle on a test drive. And I believe strongly that with no battery at all the engine alone must struggle, on a theoretical basis. Still, I am impressed with these reports.

Maybe when "forced HV" comes on, Honda has designed it to still have enough battery "cushion" to avoid angry bees or overreving for more routine driving? And only in most extreme case does this "cushion" run out? Maybe these drivers are not as acoustically sensitive as me? I don't know, but at a minimum it seems like, at least some of the time, "forced HV" is not a problem.

This is getting a bit off the OP's question, but I guess I can bring it back by saying: All agree that if the battery has some charge, the car drives beautifully even on long trips. And that therefore if you protect the charge a bit with HV mode, you will be fine. There is some minor internal disagreement re. how offputting it is (in power, or just engine high-revving) to let the battery run down to Honda's internal cutoff where HV comes on automatically. No one thinks this is harmful; so it becomes operator's choice.

 

In the likely event that the car on the dealer’s lot had been sitting for some time, the battery had probably fallen well below the 10-12% buffer the car usually leaves. That would explain the high revs. Did you happen to note the number of bars left on the battery meter? I’ve never seen it drop below 2.


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I believe there is no difference . At 0 the Clarity most likely has a 2-3 mile buffer that we don't see which decides whether it needs charge. When you hit HV it most likely sets the current EV mileage as point 0 and operates the same way as 2 bars. I can't see Honda developing a different algorithm since the whole point of HV button is to maintain charge .

 

There is a subtle difference, in that the Clarity will more liberally use battery power if you engage HV mode with more than 2 bars. The blue arc on the power meter will be slightly longer, and you will gradually lose charge in stop-and-go traffic until you get down to 2 bars. I do believe it’s the same algorithm, it just responds to the amount of battery remaining. And most importantly, the driving dynamics of the car are unchanged (with the exception of hills, as discussed above).


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I sometime drive on highway in HV mode at the speed about 110-130 km/h, I believe at that speed the ICE will be clutched to power the wheel. The Owner's manual (page 14) says: "The vehicle is cruising at a higher speed.●Propulsion is provided by the engine, coupled through the gears to the transmission. This is indicated by the gear icon in the display." but I have no idea where the "gear icon" suppose to appear since I have never seen it or I missed it. Does anyone have seen that icon when driving?