Quote:
Originally Posted by tasdrouille
What techniques everyone used?
In my case it was pretty simple. I sticked it in 5th and stayed between 1200 and 1500 rpm for the whole trip which translates to 35-40 mph actual (~+2 mph indicated). I did DWL on small hills as long as it would not go out of my 5 mph delta. I had to go up to 50 tps to keep it up crawling the big hills in 5th. Whenever I reached 40 mph with DWL I would EOC. I wanted to look up my current trip on the SG to see how many miles I had OEC but forgot to note it before taking the key off. I was too eager to fill it.
Anybody noted how long they coasted?
|
I probably drive my Prius a little differently than a non-hybrid but here's what techniques I used during the competition...
* State of Charge has to monitored at all times to ensure I'm getting max horsepower at the lowest rpm (ideally SOC is at 60% or higher) so while I tried to use EV mode as much as possible for gas free operation I also had to make sure I was recharging the battery to an efficient state (which I did not do a great job of until I realized how much elevation was on the course and I switched my plan to one of more aggressive going uphill knowing I would get some regen on the huge downhills). So a balance of EV, neutral coast and ICE coast was used. On huge downhill coasts I often did it in ICE to regen the battery if I needed it for the next round of EV use (unless I had sufficient charge in the battery and could neutral coast longer distances).
* I did heavy pulse and glide (mostly in EV mode up to 41 mph and down to 32 mph). This gave me gas free operation but also recharged the battery on the glide. While engine braking did occur on the glide I wasn't using any ICE on the pulse so it didn't matter if my pulse was longer than my glide. I also did some "rpm resetting" on those huge uphills to limit running rpm too high. While crawling it up the biggest hills I would take my foot off the accelerator for a second, watch the rpm go from 2200 down to 1500, then reapply the accelerator which resulted in climbing the hill at 1800 until it went back up to 2200 when I would repeat the process.
* I set a target of 35 mph average speed for the 104 mile course (which would get me to the finish at just under the 3 hour time limit). On some of the roads I saw no traffic for quite a distance (other than the other competition drivers) so I was able to operate easily under 41 mph and in EV mode. At the 55 mile mark my average speed was 33 mph so I picked up the pace a little on the second half of the run (thanks to the downhill coasts which were sometimes at 55-65 mph). I think using the 35 mph standard helped me to not get anxious to hurry up some of those big hills.