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Honda Insight MPG-Real World Numbers
With the price of gas being what it is, your real world mileage is becoming more important than the estimates on the sticker. This is the place to talk about your real world on the road results!
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Anyway, I also spend alot of time cleaning the car, including the underside. I display it @ car shows on saturdays, and answer lots of questions and meet nice people. With the high % of highway driving I do, AERODYNAMICS and the lean-burn catalyst are the primary reasons for such high mpg, NOT the electic system (IMA).
I applaud Honda for designing such a wonderful automobile........and shame on our culture & society for believing we need to have 300 horsepower and rush up to a stop light, only to slam on the brakes! We need to learn about momentum, leaving for work early & not hurrying! Billy......
Welcome to the forum. I'm with you on all the extra horsepower some feel they need. I'd be tickled if I could get half your mileage with my Suburban ;-)
Gary
http://avt.inel.gov/hifart.html
link title
how about leadfoots who used to drive TDIs ?
"what's the mpg, kenneth?"
Previous worst mileage: 41mpg. Best mileage: 50mpg. Now temps in Minnesota are 10-20 degrees. Mileage has now dropped to 32-35. Is the electrical overloaded? Is the CVT sluggish in cold weather? 10mpg drop is significant with no driving style changes. ?????
I can't figure this out either but it seems to be normal for Toyota Prius to lose MPG's in cold weather. It seems a larger percent drop with a hybrid than with a normal car. I had a 2007 Dodge Caliber before gas skyrocketed, went from 30mpg in summer to 23 in winter. Currently have a 2002 Prius which I bought seeing no end to skyrocketing gas. (I HATE it, the brakes are way too touchy for my big feet!) which gets normally around 47mpg but with recent subzero temps we barely manage 39mpg, and boy does the gas guage seem to go down fast!
I'm looking for real mpg numbers for the NEW Insight as a possible replacement for my loathesome 1st generation Prius. Dont get me wrong I LOVE getting close to 50mpg and could never go back to a "normal" car and guzzling 30mpg.
And the car it replaced was a 17 year old Toyota Paseo that I was getting about 25 mpg w/ so that tells you a bit about my driving style.
Slip behind a truck traveling 60 mph and one's Insight mpg's can easily increase by 10-20%.
I have a 2004 Insight which suffers similar loses in mileage with temperature. With a car averaging 56 mpg in the summer, a drop to ~48 seems a big concern. However, for those driving a car averaging 20 mpg, a drop to 18.x is hardly noticeable.
Have the dealer check it if it doesn't improve!!
So, my question, given that the Prius costs about $3,700 less (in the real world with incentives), why isn't the Insight way more popular? And why doesn't Honda push the competition way harder?
I'm kind of hoping that other Insight drivers will have additional tips for managing fuel efficiency. So far, watching that bar and the green speedometer seem to have me in a very efficient range, which is pretty cool. I'm actually hoping to go higher, so I would be interested in any tricks of more experienced Insight drivers.
is there a way to disable all the Honda Insight dashboard instant-mpg info?
I drove prius once and found the pac-man "fruit" energy-units going across the screen to be fun, superfluous, and hazardous by attracting attention from the driver.
I'd totally be interested in what other Insight (or Prius or Ford Fiesta or Civic Hybrid or *any* hybrid) drivers are getting in the real world.
Pal of mine with an early Civic Hybrid gets a constant 38 mpg on his 80 mph highway 680 california commute.
Ford fiesta has a hybrid model? Cool. The new fiesta is quite interesting to me, even without hybrid option.
I completely get a kick out of the fact that the Prius is rated, I believe, 46/51 and I'm doing easily that while hardly having taken the Insight on the highway -- and having paid $3,700 less. The one long highway trip I got 47 mpg, but that was before I learned about the horizontal bar that assesses current mpg.
One more bit of information: I drove downtown and back yesterday (I live in the Chicago suburbs), and got 52.1 mpg average on the computer, and drove much of it around 73 mph or so. So I'm definitely thinking that the 50s will be a very realistic mpg average, as I and the engine get broken in. I'm actually hoping to attain the high 50s regularly, though maybe that's too ambitious. Will keep you posted. As I said, it would be cool if a Prius owner wrote in, too. I would be interested to know what they typically get in the real world.
Tom
Situation - I drive almost exclusively highway for long trips (26 miles each way to work; 55 miles each way to the shore on weekends). To work, I only encounter 8 lights spaced far apart, and I don't usually hit them all. I rarely do short trips or city driving. I drive in southern NJ which is very flat. The MPG numbers I've shown are for the hottest month of the year. September, having somewhat cooler weather, had 4 tanks averaging 54.0 MPG. The hotter the weather the better your milage regardless of the make or model of the car or whether or not its a hybrid - but usuall hybrid owners are the only ones paying attention enough to notice.
I bought the car last April and have over 12K miles on it now, and my life time average is around 52 MPG. Its been increasing due to some "tricks" I've found, some driving style changes, the warmer weather during summer, and having gone through the break-in period of the car being new.
I'm out of time right now but will post periodically for some of the tricks I've found. Stay tuned.
The first one I will share is specific to the Insight. Some of you have already mentioned that you've found the display in the center window of the dash for the "instantaneous" milage. This is key and is needed for the first trick. For those not familiar with it - find it. It can be found by scrolling through the displays using the buttons on your steering wheel. It is a segmented horizontal bar graph that displays what milage you are getting a that second. It starts at the number 0 has a 50 in the middle and a 100 at the far rignt side. Each segment of the bar represents another 5 MPGs. Get this on the display every time you drive (you have to manually bring it up again every time you start the car). Look at this display often as you drive - it will tell you alot about how economically you are driving. Ignore the stupid speedometer background changing color - it doesn't tell you nearly as much. Above the bar graph is a large number that is the average of the MPGs you've been getting since you last reset your trip odometer. Although that's a nice thing to know, you really want to concentrate on the bar graph for the instantaneous number. When you're starting from a stop, this graph will be about two or three segments (10 or 15 MPGs). When you are coasting it can easily be all segments full (100 MPGs). Try to keep it over 60 MPGs most of the time. Experiment with what it takes to get there.
Now that you've found the display, we can discuss the first trick I've found when using this display. But I have to go right now, so I will pick this up in my next post. Sorry.
That's like the end-of-year cliffhanger for a tv series!
I'm totally interested in the tricks you've found. My new Insight now is a little more than three months old. I'm getting typically 48-49 mpg overall for every tank. On highways it's more like 52-53 per trip, and on roads where I go about 45 with few stops, I average 54 and even up to 60 and more. But the lower tank average is because of doing many one-mile trips with frequent stops. Anyway, I am totally interested in any tricks for getting the overall average up into the 50s on a regular basis -- especially highways.
Thanks,
Tom
So now when you are cruising on the highway and just maintaining speed with constant pressure on the gas pedal on flat level ground, look at the instantaneous display. It will be...whatever... say 50 MPG. Here's what you do (and I found this by accident -- maybe others have found it too.) If you release your foot off the pedal and momentarily coast (for, say, one second), you will see the instantaneous display climbs to full (100 MPG). You don't have to wait for it to get to 100. But as it starts to climb gently reapply pressure to the gas pedal. Don't press as hard as you had been pressing. Just ease in enough to maintain speed. You'll now find that you don't have to press as hard to keep the same speed. And the instantaneous millage display will settle in at a higher value (say, 60 or 70, or sometimes higher). It might not always happen on the first try. Do it again. It won't happen easily when the car is cold. Or even when warm but you haven't been driving long enough that the engine has reached it's most efficient temperature. On a slight incline, it is harder yet to do. But keep trying 'till you get it. Once you get it to stay higher, keep checking on it periodically. Road conditions (slight inclines, bumps, curves, speed changes due to traffic) will cause it to drop back to a lower value. So do it again to get it back higher again.
Why does it work? I think it has to do with the Constant Velocity Transmission. Perhaps it works on all CVT cars, but I don't know since this is the first CVT I've ever driven. My theory is that by letting off the gas, you coax the transmission into a higher "gear" for lack of better word. Even though the car tells you that it has 7 gears (found when playing with the paddle shifter), it really has lots of gears in between. It's more like a tapered funnel allowing for infinite gears. So even though you may be in 7th gear when cruising, you may be in a low 7th. (7th is really a range of available gear ratios). By letting off the gas momentarily, the car's computer realizes that it doesn't need to worry about brisk acceleration. So it slides up to a higher gear ratio within the range of 7th gear. If you reapply the gas too quickly or too hard, the transmission will think you may want more performance and so it will go right back down to the old spot on the funnel. But done right, it coaxes the transmission into a less performance but more economically efficient gear ratio. At least that's one possible explanation for why it works, but I could be completely full of it. Maybe it has more to do with fuel injection - but I'm sticking to my story 'cause it makes sense to me.
Now when you do this, with time you'll be able to hear and feel a difference. The engine seems to sound and feel like its running slower (lending credence to my gear ratio theory). Try it at all speeds. If you can boost the instantaneous millage display one or two bars up further than it would have been, you've gained 5 or 10 MPG for that moment. And since the overall gas millage during a tank of gas is the average of all the instantaneous measurements, the longer you keep it up the better your tank millage will be.
Try it if you haven't already found this on your own, and post back to let me know if this was helpful. Next time I'll reveal another twist on the same theme. (There's that cliff hanger again.)
To work and back (13 miles) TDI gives me 34-41 mpg depending on how the traffic and lights hit you. The Insight got 52 mpg, again in cold weather but unusual good luck hitting the lights and little traffic. Still I was impressed and don't think the TDI could hope to match it. I saw a "pinks" competition of a TDI with an insight suggested in one of the prior messages. For the TDI to have a chance it better be on the open road! That said, the TDI does have more power and accelerates quicker, weighs 550# more, rides a little smother and quieter, has a better rear seat and twice the cargo volume, a super sunroof and roof rack, and that manual shift that I find so sweet. My continued affection for it is quite secure.
I'm convinced the Insight ought to be rated higher by the EPA. If these tips are very usable by the average driver, and if these immediate-feedback mechanisms are almost hard to avoid, it seems to me the EPA testers ought to use these mechanisms when they test the Insight. This makes me believe the Insight mpg rating ought to be roughly equivalent to that of the Prius. Of course, I imagine the Prius will soon have such tools if it doesn't already.
I also find it disappointing that Honda seems to have essentially abandoned marketing the Insight. Personally, I'm convinced it's a great car. I consciously chose it over the Fit and Prius (one for appearance/mileage reasons, one for cost reasons) and it seems to me that Honda ought to capitalize on these clear advantages.
When you start off from a stop light and accelerate to your final speed, you'll notice on your instantaneous gas milage display that you only have two or three bars (10 or 15 MPG at that moment). It makes sense to be this low because you are doing a lot of work to accelerate a heavy hunk of metal. It will stay that way until you approach your final speed and relax the gas pedal. So perhaps that's maybe, 15 or 20 seconds of really low gas milage that will get averaged into your total MPG number. What if you could increase the poor milage for at least part of your acceleration time, that way it would cause less of a toll on your overall milage. Here's how.
Use the same technique I've previously discussed where as you let up on the gas pedal momentarily to coax the CVT transmission into a higher gear ratio, and then gently reapply. Repeat this every 5 seconds or so while accelerating. On the first lift and reapplication, you'll notice that instead of only two or three bars, you'll now have three or four bars. The next time you do it (five seconds later) you'll have maybe five or six bars, and so on. You will allow the instanteneous milage to creep up from the basement during the acceleration period. It will take less of a toll on your overall milage.
There's more tips to follow. Stay tuned.
CVT = Continuously Variable Transmission
BTW...I bought a used '07 Prius and I average 50mpg (highway/city and everything in between). For me I'd rather have a used Prius than a new Insight mostly because the Insight was too small inside for passengers & cargo. My Fit averages in the mid to upper 30s MPG and has even more cargo space.
But I think the Insight would be great for those who don't need a lot of back seat or trunk space.
As far as the VW TDI. For me the problem with diesels in this country is that the cost of diesel fuel makes the cost per mile to drive a diesel too low in comparison to a hybrid. If diesel cost the same as 87 octane, then I'd consider them.
What this is good for, is to show you what you're overall milage *would* be if you could continue to keep the bar graph at that number for an extended period of time. And it can teach you how and what driving styles or road conditions affect your milage, and by how much. For instance, if all I did all day was accelerate, the graph shows me that my overall milage would be about 15 MPG. But if all I did was coast, my milage would be 100 MPG (or higher - the display can only go up to 100 though). And because I know that the overall milage for a tank of gas is the average of all of the instanteneous readings during that tank, I can see and try to avoid the things that make it go lower. The other displays are tougher to interperet because if you get a lower number you might not know what caused it. Whereas the instantaneous graph gives you immediate feedback and shows the severity of the penalty or reward (unlike the green/blue dash color change, which may also be instantaneous, but doesn't show severity very well.)
Don't be confused by the large numerical display above the bar graph. THAT is not instantaneous - it is an average since you last reset your trip odometer. As such, it is not related to the bar graph. It just happens to be on the same display screen.
I'll try to get to my next tip next time...
This technique is know as the "Fake Shift", and I used it on my 2006 Freestyle and current 2008 FEH.