Honda Insight review -- two years of mileage data

Two years in with my 2010 Honda Insight and the overall average mileage has stayed virtually the same. As you can see by the chart, the highs aren't as high, but the lows aren't quite as low. This means I've maintained the 40+ mpg I got in year one. You can also see the pretty sharp rise in gas prices over the last six months.

You can see the summer months still give the best performance by quite a bit. This can be attributed to needing to run the engine more in the winter to heat the cabin and the fact that the engine doesn't shut off at stops. Also, battery performance is degraded in colder temperatures. If I were buying a Nissan Leaf, I'd want to understand what a Wisconsin winter will do to the overall range as the Leaf has air cooled batteries like the Insight (albeit at a much higher capacity).

Overall, I'm still relatively pleased with the mileage numbers. The car is by no means fun to drive and I wouldn't recommend it for longer highway trips. But, it is an excellent city car and I haven't had a single issue with it.

One more year to go before the lease is up. I'll most likely be moving on to another car. I've driven the Chevrolet Volt and like the package. Since I drive mostly in the city, I'll benefit from being able to drive electric nearly 100% of the time. However, I like the flexibility of being able to drive longer distances and I think the gas generator is nice insurance against the reduced cold weather performance 100% electric cars will likely see in Wisconsin (at least in the short term).

One year of gas with the 2010 Honda Insight Hybrid

I filled up the tank today to mark one year of ownership of my 2010 Honda Insight hybrid.

As you can see in the chart, I've averaged 40.65 miles per gallon in travelling 5,913 miles (it's a city car, thus the low miles) using 145.46 gallons of gas for a total cost of $372.52 or $0.066 per mile.

What's apparent is that it doesn't perform nearly as well in the winter (Wisconsin winter) as it does in the summer. I'd attribute this to two factors. One, batteries don't perform as well when it is cold, two, I had to run the heat, which meant I didn't get to take advantage of the idle stop functionality much.

Overall, I'm happy with 40 mpg. However, I was really loving the 47+ mpg I got in August.

If you are curious as to my driving habits, I did the entire year in Eco mode, but didn't drive much differently than I normally would. I did try to use hills to coast and never slammed the gas. I won the Eco Challenge game back in February so I guess I'm a master hybrid driver.

Cold weather battery performance is a huge issue for me as I look for my next car to be 100% electric. I know GM just finished a ton of cold weather testing for the Chevy Volt and they were pleased with the results. I hope other electric car makers are taking a similar approach.

When was the last time you laughed at an order confirmation e-mail?

It is winter in Wisconsin and I was in need of a nice, warm hat. A stylish, classic is the Stormy Kromer. I ordered directly from their site and here's the order confirmation e-mail I received:

Just thought we would let you know that in just a few minutes, your order will be carefully removed from our Stormy Kromer shelves, placed into some sort of container, and sent on its way to you. And if it's cold where you are, then you are correct in feeling pretty darn good about that. If it's warm where you are, keep it to yourself... no point in rubbing it in.

Prior to its departure, a semi-qualified team of almost 50 inspectors (actually, it'll be just one person, but she's really good) will check your order to make sure it passes muster. Our "packing specialist" will then ask for a collective moment of silence, and a reverent calm will fall over the entire factory as we all watch her place your order into some sort of shipping thingamajig.

Of course, all of this excitement will give rise to a big party afterwards, resulting in the whole factory taking the remainder of the day off to walk your package to the local post office, where most of our town will show up and join in to wish it a cheerful Bon Voyage!

Once your order has shipped, the party is over and everyone’s back to work, we’ll be in touch with your tracking number.

I hope you enjoyed shopping with us. As you can tell, we sure do. In fact, we are considering nominating you for Customer of the Year! We'll see.

Really clever and something not all companies can pull off. Hopefully, I can pull of the hat in a similar fashion.

Hybrids have their privilages

Trying the new Posterous iPhone app. It lets you post pictures in real time. Unfortunately, it looks like only the first picture gets added to my blog.

Posted via web from Eric's posterous

That's better--2010 Honda Insight mpg update

Almost three months into ownership of the 2010 Honda Insight, my last fill-up finally met with my expectations--45+ mpg. Ironically, I acheived this without trying to drive maximizing mpg (however, there were about 100 highway miles on this tank).

I had been averaging around 41 mpg on my first three tanks of gas and was somewhat disappointed. One, because the trip computer was reporting over 47 mpg, but doing the actual calculation, it was significantly lower than that. The other reason was I was driving in ECON mode and trying to keep the speedometer indicator in the green (which isn't the most fun driving I've ever done).

This time around, I did keep the car in ECON mode, but drove it with more aggressive accelleration than I had been. Maybe I was getting the benefits of the hypermiling technique of "pulse and glide."

In any case, I hope 45 mpg is the worst mileage I get for the rest of the summer. When the weather cools off, I'm expecting the battery performance, and therefore mpg, to suffer a bit.

So far, so good. The car has all the tech comforts I wanted (GPS, iPod integration, Bluetooth), but I gave up RWD, manual transmission performance to get higher mpg. 45 mpg makes me feel better about the decision.

One note on mpg--it really isn't the best way to measure the fuel efficiency of a vehicle (in an easy to compare way anyhow). Gallons per mile, or gallons per 100 miles makes the math much easier to do in your head when comparing vehicles. See the MPG Illusion for more information.

I'm using 2.38 gallons per 100 miles so far. To put that in comparison, my old car (a 2002 Lexus IS300) was using about 6 gallons to go the same distance. A 2.38 gpm means I can commute to work all week and back using just over 2 gallons of gas. That sounds good to me.

Calculate your own GPM