My New (to me) Civic! “Prius Killer”

[JacobLeSann]

I work as a delivery driver for local mechanics and I see a whole assortment of vehicles sitting around their parking lots. I was digging around the local car wash and noticed a very decent 2006 Civic LX coupe with a 5 speed manual. I went on a goose chase and ended up buying it and getting the proper paperwork, but didn’t end up working on it. I had a big group trip in Edmonton to see Roger Waters and I didn’t even have a car, so from August through to September I fixed it up and got it on the road. Needed a clutch and some front brakes, not much else.


The night before the trip I decided to go wild with leftover coroplast from my first civic, and after maybe 2 hours and lots of coffee this was the result.





The car is awesome! I’m used to clunky 90’s models that really needed work, but with this one I went through and did everything nice and proper. The car drove from The Pas to Edmonton with only one fill-up, which costed me $47 CAD. That’s a 12 hour drive at 100 km/h for only $47! According to the scangauge, I averaged 28-30 MPG on city runs and 38-42 MPG down the highway with cruise control.

Better yet, I’ve been commuting with it the past couple of days to work and back. Using DWL at 80 km/h, I got an average of 48 MPG. Today I tried the same at 70 km/h, and I hit 50 MPG! I haven’t gotten serious enough to fact-check the gauge with some math, but so far I’ve gone 650km on the 13 gallon tank without going to empty line yet. Super happy with this car.

[freebeard]

Nice.

Bonneville spoiler and ventilated wheel disks. Air dam? Anything I can't see?

[Phase]

The air discs actually look pretty cool. Even adding some cool painted designs would be nice. Getting light year zero or Ioniq 5 wheel cover vibes

[JacobLeSann]

Total mods:
-Wheel discs
-rubber airdam
-rear bonneville spoiler
-front grille block

Wow, that Ioniq 5 looks neat. Didn’t know about until now. I plan to make some fancier discs that connect to the centre caps on the wheels. Rotiform Aerodiscs are my favorite. The 2006-2010 CDM civic coupes had Honda Insight-style wheel discs on certain models but I can’t seem to find any near me.

I plan to do some more cardboard/tape testing this weekend for fun, and I’ll do some sketches for a final design. I’ll keep you guys posted.


Also, just finished off my tank! From Edmonton to The Pas and then three days of commuting. 750km on one tank.

[freebeard]

Rotiform Aerodiscs are my favorite.

Price £140 (each). Ouch. They only fit certain wheels with a thread hex center nut. Do your wheels have a threaded/threadable center?


I was looking for something else and I found this:


ecomodder.com/forum/showthread.php/question-moon-discs-alloy-wheels-permalink #50

[Phase]

Have you done any testing with the bonneville spoiler like before and after mpg or coast down or throttle stop?

I’ve thought about making flat discs for my Ioniq hybrid so I can paint or print my own graphic design on them and give them a blade runner cyber type design versus the current wheel covers I have. The ones I have now are extremely aero, but flat ones would probably be better but worse cooling

[JacobLeSann]

I haven’t done any testing in terms of the mods, but I have just finished doing some amateur tuft testing. First time doing it! I waxed up the body of the car and removed all aero mods, then went ahead and tested. Results seemed very good. Airflow the front of the car is great, and flow at the rear is so-so; as I expected.
What was unexpected is the side-view mirrors messing up flow over the windows so terribly. Yikes! You can really see how much it derails the attached flow over the sides. Flow over the rear is confusing. At 60 km/h or so, the tufts point straight back in proper alignment, but at 80+ km/h the middle-base of the rear windshield seems to have a separation bubble. I assume that comes from the transition to the trunk-lid. I think I can see some turbulence behind the rear wheels as well, for the bumper might be shrinking inward a bit too steeply given it’s short length.

So overall? Flow seems quite good. The rear end seems rough, the wheels rougher, and the mirrors terrible. I don’t really see any other issues beyond those, so that’s good.


To the drawing board!




[IMG][/IMG]

[ECO-AKJ]

Manual trans???, needs a starter kill switch

What tire pressure are you running?, I run at 3PSI below max sidewall, I drive some really bumpy roads on my commute

[JacobLeSann]

Manual? Always.

I run my tires at 40 PSI, across my whole handful of vehicles. Could go higher but meh. Met a guy while buying parts for my ‘97 who has worked in a tire repair shop most of his life and he told me 40 PSI is just about perfect. He could be wrong but I trust him in terms of balancing rolling resistance vs traction and tread wear.

I plan to sell the car to my mom once I fix up my ‘96 hatch. She would like the extra MPG from aero mods, but I highly doubt she’d enjoy a kill switch. Even for myself, I don’t really like them. My scanguage stops reading my MPG when I kill the engine, and while the real-life MPG is undoubtedly higher, it tends to read lower averages as it’s not scanning when EOC. I’ve tried to remedy this by going into hybrid mode but it immediately fudges all figures. If somebody has a fix for this, I’ll get more into EOC.

Funny enough, the car can go 200 km/h on 140 HP! I’m amazed the tape held up. Must be racing-spec packing tape.

[ECO-AKJ]

I understand where you are coming from, I will use instrumentation for watching coolant temp, air temps, etc, however if I am running factory size tires, I always figure my mileage at the pump, I have had multiple vehicles where the factory MPG instrumentation isn't 100% accurate, kudos on your improvements.