[brucepick]

Of course if you charge your battery off the grid (or solar or whatever) and not off gasoline, you're actually doing better than a hybrid. In that a hybrid still gets all its energy from gasoline. With EPES, your car is actually partially an EV. Not very much, but just a little bit.

Kind of along the lines of the last few posts here,
though NOT turning it into a hybrid -
running an EPES system takes a certain amount of load off the engine.
So you can get up a hill with just slightly less throttle.

The way Honda's lean burn is set up, if you exceed the throttle limit, it goes out of lean burn. So with EPES you can stay in lean burn in slightly more demanding situations - such as a steeper hill or more headwind. Or if conditions are good with no hill or headwind, you simply need less throttle = less fuel.