[diablote]

I hauled a load of recycling to the dump this morning, and it seemed that the hybrid battery wasn't ready for action. It was a little cool out, so I imagine it wanted to both charge and warm up. I let the petrol engine do its thing (it didn't turn off at any of the stoplights), and I didn't pulse-and-glide to try to trigger electric mode. I kept acceleration to ~20% power in Eco mode, which kept the acceleration RPMs pretty low. And my speed never exceeded 45 mph.

Well, I've not gotten much worse performance. The engine stayed on most of the trip (about 4 miles), and my now-reset average plummeted. Turning off the truck when I got there, the trip report was 36.6 mpg. I'm thinking that's the basic engine-CVT performance, which would explain why others are getting around ~40 mpg—and why that Car and Driver article whinged about the truck's low mpgs at speed. So I feared that my honeymoon was already over…and that after just one tank of petrol!

So on the way home, the gloves came off. I took a mile longer route with way more stoplights, but lower speed and much less inclined. I lost 4% of my braking recapture to one stoplight but got 100% at the rest. I put my pulses at 50% power to target speed (~45 mph for most of the trip) and then abruptly released the accelerator to induce EOC. I then feathered the electric motor back up to coast or ±5% power. The fuel economy skyrocketed, and was back in the mid-50s by the time I got home. And the trip report was 78 mpg.

So like my prior high fuel economy endeavors, I'm having to modify my behavior to match the tech. The Maverick is yielding yet a third way from my other two methods for my '05 Civics. But the most impressive part is that the Maverick's tech allows me to meet or best the Civics with a mass 1000 lbs heavier (1.4x) with all the aerodynamic gracefulness of a brick.