All the above posts are true and I agree with them.
Thus I have driven over 6 months and 4,000 miles locally with only a loss of 8 miles of HV range and no loss of gas gauge bars or need to refuel. That’s at least 99.8% EV.
Ken, just want to point this out as I see a golden opportunity. You've asked more than once in other threads why certain people, such as yourself, have never once heard the angry bees...and I have speculated it's largely due to differing individual driving practices. This statement from you explains to me with great clarity (I find that punny...sorry) why you've never heard them. Your driving habits simply don't require the bees to ever go to work. It most certainly is commendable, especially since you're doing this largely on solar as well. Kudos on your carbon footprint, you're making the world a better place.
To illustrate the contrast between your driving and mine, I'd say most every day our car leaves the home it is going 60 miles minimum (many days much farther, including many many 200 mile days and a dozen or so 800 mile days.) And 60% of even our daily local driving is on the interstate with 70mph speed limit and steady traffic flow near 80mph. Our Clarity has over 12,000 miles on it now, since buying new barely over 4 months ago. If this continues my wife and I will be 30,000/mile a year drivers in this car. (Side note I sold a 2016 Honda Civic with 74,000 miles recently, which I bought new, after 1.5 years of ownership...97% self-employed business use...but we are not using the Clarity much for business so this car will see less.) But our Clarity's ICE starts up at some point, almost every single day we drive it, especially in winter, because it needs to in order to support our driving style and distances. Bear in mind this does NOT mean wife and I get high revving angry bees every day. Frankly they're rare. But we give them plenty of opportunities to awaken, and we do very occasionally experience them, during certain times where we're pushing the car pretty far or hard in a day. I can assure you that if you and I traded cars for a week, you'd certainly never hear them from my machine with your driving habits, and I would likely summon them out of yours on occasion, without even trying. And I'd use up your old gasoline LOL. We fill our tank at least once every two weeks or so -- getting usually between 400 and 1500 mile range per tank, depending on how local we stay or how many long-day roadtrips are taken. We use electric at every chance we can, but we run plenty of gas thru the car also cuz we don't own a 75 mile long extension cord that stays attached to a moving car...
I do believe anyone who has driving patterns such as yours, and who does not follow and understand these threads as closely as you do, and suddenly changes driving patterns (like a vacation or very long road trip or change in workplace or whatever), could easily be caught off guard the first time the ICE is asked to truly go to work. I don't mean just turning on and running for a little while at low rpms and shutting off, like yours rarely does, but actually PUT IT TO WORK...hard. Cuz I admit it's really pretty weird if you're used to a normal ICE car, or used to an electric car, or used to another Hybrid car. The way this engine is programmed to function is like nothing else 99.9% of the general public has ever experienced. Maybe a former Volt owner has a concept, but that's about the only type of person off the street who might understand. I believe EVERYONE else will be a bit surprised the first time it happens...and I can see this actually inciting concern, complaints, dealer visits, Consumer Report complaints, internet searches and posts to this site, and even a certain amount of dislike for the car, all of which we occasionally see mentioned here on the forum.
Let's also remember we have maybe 200 or less Clarity PHEV owners represented on this forum with any regularity at all, and how many tens of thousands are out on the road now? We may think we know what kind of things are going down in Clarity world here, but we only know the perspectives of less than 1% of them who take the time to write here. We here do NOT have a true big picture from the general public of the ownership experience perspective of the vast majority of Clarity owners. This forum has a few enthusiasts, and a few who love their car, a few who hate their car, a few in-between, a few complainers, a few who own the car and just enjoy internet forums, a few who don't even own the car, a few with serious problems with their car, and a few who frankly don't understand certain things...but it's a very very small cross-section of each category, and I frankly drift between a couple of those categories myself depending on the day.
And again my comments have nothing to do with loss of power in conjunction with the high revs. This I still maintain is a defect and/or programming glitch, which I have fortunately not yet experienced a single time with my car, and wife has never complained of such a thing happening either. I wish it on nobody and I will be first to jump down Honda's throat privately and publicly, should I ever experience it on ours.
That's an awful long way of saying "your experiences may vary." But heck it's pretty dang cold out and I'm not goin' anywhere today so I chose to listen to myself talk this mornin'. To everyone in the polar vortex zone...be safe and keep warm!!
