My first drives of Hybrids!

[bennelson]

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!!!!!

[ankit]

Those sound like some nice roads to use Hypermiling techniques on. I've never ridden or driven a hybrid, did you think it was weird when the gas engine kicked in? What did they think about your EV?

[bennelson]

It felt a little wierd how the Insight would automatically start and stop the engine when you put it in, or took it out of gear.

It made me wonder how difficult it would be to modify my truck to do the same thing.

Everyone was really interested in my EV's. I didn't bring the motorcycle out because it was an hour's ride away, raining, AND were taking the meeting on the road.