This past week, I have had several fun run-ins with hybrid cars.
I got a chance to talk to "EV Jerry" as part of his tour riding around the country promoting plug-ins.
Spirit of DC - PHEV3A
Thursday night, I got to drive a Prius. This was actually the first time I have ridden in one too. I have sat in them before, but just have never yet had a chance to go anywhere. One of the members of the
Milwaukee Hybrid Group was visiting to be part of an alternative vehicles panel I was presenting at a sustainability conference. He let me drive
The Prius is a nice car. Big, plenty of seating, nice smooth acceleration. I thought the display on it was a little wierd. The dashboard is sort of long, so the display is physically rather far from the driver. Also, I am a tad taller than average and the rear-view mirror was a little low for me because of that.
Yesterday, I made it out to a
Madison Hybrid Group meeting. This was a special meeting, because it was taken on the road. The ringleader, Eric, let me drive his car - a Honda Insight 5-speed.
That is a cool little car! After killing it a couple times (the clutch is WAY different than my truck's!) I was able to pull away from the parking lot to drive off to where the meeting was actually going to be held.
The funny thing was that this was a caravan, with 5 other cars following, and me in the lead, never having driven one before!!! It was rolling country hills, 45-55 mph roads. The car feels like driving a CRX, but every once in a while, somebody is behind the car pushing! (in a good way!). The car does have a weird blind-spot that makes it hard to chance lanes to the left, but adjusting the mirrors helped with that quite a bit.
After a drive of 15-20 miles, Eric checked the trip fuel economy for me. I got 69.7 mpg, in my first time driving an Insight!!!!!