Yesterday I went to Cologne to visit my brother, and this was a premiere using the new used car with its hybrid gasoline / electric engine drivetrain.
First thing I noticed when trying to use the cruise control (and yes, ours has one) was that the car tried to keep to the set speed ‘at all costs’, so its energy-efficiency meter went almost all the way up into ‘power mode’ when going uphill, just to keep the car at whatever you had set it to.
If you don’t use cruise control and try to keep it in the green ‘eco’ friendly part, you’re definitely more oriented at lorry / truck speeds than at those on the left lane overtaking each other. So you’re going slow – this car somehow manages to teach you how to do that.
On the way back from my brother I didn’t care, and went those roundabout 200 kilometers more or less at lorry and truck speeds, only overtaking them uphill when they got really slow. So on flat roads I kept the speed at around 110km/h, trying to also spend most of the time in that green area, only entering mid of ‘power’ mode on some uphill places. This was the result after arriving back home:
On the way to Cologne I had an average of about 90km/h until arriving at the big city where you had to go slow, on the way back I didn’t look at that, but here it shows 74km/h overall, so including city traffic (mostly 50 or even 30km/h). As I said, lorry and truck speeds, they mostly go around 90km/h.
Real fuel consumption on average (at the gas station) was slightly under 5l/100km last time, but that included many short-distance drives in winter, so instead of going electric the car often used the petrol engine just to fill up its battery, and to keep us warm.
Have to get used to this. It’s definitely a different way of driving, but it’s good that a car like this makes you at least think about these things.
As always, thanks for reading.
P.S.: this time when fuelling up the car I had an average fuel consumption of about 4.7l/100km which is about 50 US or 60 British mpg. Cool.