Is there a way to view the battery percentage remaining, as opposed to the rated range? I find on my wife's Leaf that the percent number is more useful, since the range estimate doesn't account for different driving conditions on different parts of your trip. (And it's useful to say, "I arrived with <60% charge; I should find a place to plug in before I head home."
As Kendalf says, the only way to get this is the HondaLink app. Note also that it's showing usable battery capacity (similar to the "fuel" gauge on the left of the instrument cluster), so 100% isn't 17kWh but 100% of whatever usable amount is available (which is good and makes more sense). I actually am not sure if it shows 0% at the 2-bar level the car considers empty for EV purposes or not (have only emptied the battery once and didn't check). Maybe someone else can chime in.
You could also of course just look at the battery fuel gauge on the dash to estimate. There are 20 bars, so each bar should represent 5% of usable capacity. If you want to be precise and count the 2 bar reserve separately, technically each bar is 5.6% of usable EV capacity. (I'm actually curious if this gauge is linear, though--I've noticed a couple times that it seems to drop more slowly toward the top of the gauge, but it could be psychological.)
Is there a way to show instantaneous power usage or average miles/kWh for the trip? Since I bought the car, the average fuel economy has been pegged at 199.9, which is pretty useless. I can't seem to find a way to display the EV efficiency. (Ideally, Honda would use the same display regardless of mode, and convert everything to MPGe so we could compare apples to apples.)
No. I sure wish there was, though, and really miss the instantaneous kW, plus kWh total and kWh/mile readout from the Volt.
This isn't practical from a daily use standpoint, but one might be able to extract some of that information from the service port, though I haven't read about anybody trying it yet.
I have noticed a weird thing where if I turn off the car and go to put something in the trunk, the car emits a fast series of beeps and then doesn't auto-lock when I walk away. We think we discovered that the car somehow thinks the keys are in the trunk and is trying to prevent locking me out. (In reality, the keys are in my pocket and I'm standing just behind the car.) Is this normal, or is there something wrong here? Maybe a miscalibrated sensor somewhere?
This is normal. Stupid, but normal.
What it's actually doing is, I believe, telling you "You've left something open and therefore I will not lock the car automatically." It will do the same thing if, say, the passenger door is ajar when you get out of the car and take the remote with you. If the car beeps once after you get out, it's telling you "The remote is not in the car anymore and all the doors are closed, so I will lock automatically once you walk away." It does a single beep a second time when it actually locks.
The "you left a door open!" thing is flagrantly annoying, because if you don't notice it, the car ends up remaining unlocked even if you subsequently close all doors and walk away. The logic is supposed to be "Car locks when remote is X feet away, if nothing is open", but in practice the programming and sensor sensitivity on this is erratic at best, so if you hear the rapid beeps you need to lock it manually.
Fun tip if you didn't notice already: The auto-unlock (if you have it enabled) is triggered by some sort of inductive proximity sensor in the driver and passenger front door handles, so it will unlock if your hand is very close to the handle for about 1 second. At first I thought it was just distance based until I realized it didn't unlock until I got impatient and started to reach for the door every time. This is pretty cool, and actually works consistently. No sensors in the back door handles, though.
I actually had it do something even weirder when the car
locked itself when I walked up to it. It obviously had failed to lock earlier, but I have no idea why it suddenly decided to lock when I got in range.
I know that the regen paddles remember their setting in Sport mode but not in Econ (which is where I really want to maximize regen braking!). Is there any way to change it so that the car will not reset the deceleration level after each stop?
Nope, Sport mode is sadly your only option. I really miss a one-pedal driving mode (they could have put an "L" gear on the transmission or something).
Did you notice that the first pull on the left paddle displays two "V" symbols? I now believe that one "V" and no "V" symbols both represent the same default regen selection because I can't feel any difference between one "V" and no "V" symbols. Therefore, there are only 3 additional regen levels available. BTW, the brake lights come on when 4 "V" symbols are displayed.
You're correct, although technically there
are four regen modes. One is just always on, even if you don't use the paddles (take your foot off the accelerator and don't touch the paddles, and you'll notice it regens slightly, presumably to simulate the feel of high-gear engine braking when you take your foot off the gas in a conventional car). If you want no regen at all, you need to shift into neutral (and the car will coast noticeably better if you do so).
