[MetroMPG]

(May 29/07)

Spent about half an hour in the Camry today. My bro in-law found a nearly ideal "ring road" in a commercial area in Ottawa that permitted almost unmolested driving at P&G speeds.

We were able to squeeze 78.9 mpg (US) on this route from a warmed up car.

Conditions were great: dry; 21 C; Wind W 11km/h; Relative Humidity 43%; Pressure 102.45 kPa.

Since it's a ring road, this is a fairly close approximation of what's possible on a round trip on a more normal route, since we were continually averaging head/side/tailwinds and returning to our "starting" elevation (the change was certainly no more than 10 feet).

I learned on cleanmpg that using neutral in the Camry is one way that you can bypass the difficulty of feathering the pedal to try to glide. But you must let the engine stop before going for neutral for the glide. If you pop it into N before the ICE has autostopped, it will not autostop. Also, when in N, you have mechanical brakes only - no regen. (Suspect this is stuff Prius drivers already know.)

Note that:

1) I have precious little experience driving hybrid drivetrains.
2) The tires were only at Toyota's recommended pressure.
3) The car is not broken in - only on its 3rd tank of fuel.
4) We may have been dealt a small penalty from the constant steering through the arc of the route.

All of which is to say that this car is capable of more under ideal conditions with an experienced driver and some more pressure in the tires. 80+ would be no problem.

Note also that we used my SG1 to get these figures (no nav screen) - the offsets/calibrations for my Firefly (Metro) were removed and the engine size param. was changed for the Camry.

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For fun afterwards, we re-set the SG1 with the Blackfly's offsets and returned to the route. Using the same upper/lower indicated P&G speeds as the Camry (55/25 km/h) I saw 129 mpg (US).

Afterwards, I realized I forgot to compensate for the Firefly's pessimistic speedometer (from the transmission swap, it's roughly 5% off) - so that 129 mpg run was actually achieved at a slightly higher average speed than the Camry's run.