White Gnat exceeds 600 miles on a tank

[elhigh]

A Gen I Insight would be the bee's knees for me. Except my wife and I commute with our son to college, all going to destinations in a radius of a mile and a half after a 20 mile Interstate haul. The Insight would be great, but two seats is too few.

The regen is pretty significant in my experience. It's most useful in our hilly little town where speed limits are 25. Third gear and regen are sufficient to hold me just under that at full recharge, watts going into the battery instead of out the brake rotors as heat. Niiiiice. Decelerating for exit ramps or really any significant direction change, I start further out and usually dump any kinetic energy as regen. The brakes don't get a lot of work on my car!

One peeve I have, and other HCH owners might want to weigh in on this, is how regen comes on fully with the cruise control on. I have a long downhill where the car could easily crack 70 if I just put it in neutral and let it coast. If I put the cruise control on to make coping with tailgaters easier, as the car overspeeds the setpoint the regen comes on all the way, the car drops below the setpoint and regen drops out entirely. Ebb and flow, like the surf. It makes my wife motion sick. It'd be nice if it could detect a rate of change and back off the regen based on that.

[wmjinman]

Interesting. Thanks!!

So on cruise control, it applies the regenerative braking to keep from coasting too fast downhill, but is not smooth about it, eh? Seems like something they could "refine" in future models. They've got cars that can park themselves now - they should be able to put logic into the cruise control that lets the actual speed "float" a little rather than the strictly "on & off" type setup you describe.

[RedDevil]

In my 2nd gen Insight I found it kept speeding beyond the set limit on downhills - in Eco mode and D, where the CVT maxes out the gear ratio.
The cruise control is very lax in Eco mode, much more aggressive when not.

I experimented with eco on and of, D with or without shifting paddles, S mode and even L mode downhills, but it was distracting. Flappy paddles are hopeless in hairpin corners.
Finally I stopped using CC in the mountains altogether and just keep it in D and brake or gas as needed. It will max out regeneration when breaking in any mode anyway.

About added drag by the hybrid system:
The hybrid systen in both Insight gens is nothing more than an electric motor doubling as a flywheel and an extra camshaft to lift the valves in DFCO/EV mode. The motor might cause some extra drag, but it doubles as an alternator (it has no separate 12V alternator) so that cancels out.
It cannot unhook the ICE completely like Toyota does with the HSD drive system, so it is less efficient in EV mode. No big deal as it is in ICE mode most of the time.

Sorry for the diversion... Back to the mighty Gnat?

[wmjinman]

Thanks for that information. I've always been fascinated & curious about how, exactly, hybrids work, so that information is appreciated.

I expect I'll get a hybrid someday. Maybe when the gnat dies, I'll look for a 1st gen Insight. It took me quite a few years between when I was first blown away by the reports of the Geo Metro mileage abilities and when I finally got one. So it will probably be similar with the Insight.