Best economy for motorway drive

[Fjpod]

Agreed that there is probably no clear winner when you are taking long trips. In my case, I like to keep the battery at least half charged or so because I never know when I am going to hit bad traffic... and of course, I try to reach home with an empty battery.

[oscarmax]

Agreed that there is probably no clear winner when you are taking long trips. In my case, I like to keep the battery at least half charged or so because I never know when I am going to hit bad traffic... and of course, I try to reach home with an empty battery.

+1

[Togfather]

Hello, and many thanks for the replies.

For those who are interested I did conduct my own tests and the results are as follows:

Starting with an empty battery and driving in eco mode with "charge" activated, then deactivating "charge" when battery more than half full, and re-activating "charge" again when battery empty resulted in a consumption of 38.2 miles per gallon over 200 miles, driven at a steady 59 miles per hour in ACC.

Starting with an empty battery and driving in eco mode for 200 miles, allowing the car to use its automated charging system resulted in 42.3 miles per gallon over 200 miles, driven at a steady 59 miles per hour in ACC.

Best wishes


Tog

[ThudnBlundr]

While your willingness to experiment is admirable, unless the driving conditions, weather and geography were identical for both tests, they're fairly meaningless. Plus a sample of one is also notoriously random. On the same drive down from Yorkshire to Cornwall to visit by brother, my consumption has varied between 32 and 45mpg. Admittedly I'm not trying to have a reproducible experiment, but my variation of almost 50% shows how "random" readings can be

[Togfather]

Thanks for your input, and I agree that there are some variables which cannot be controlled.

However, I did the test in the same direction on the same road on the same day (I drove the journey, drove back, and drove the journey again) and used the ACC for all of the journey, except where traffic required me to slow down, so I believe this was the best test I could perform, short of using a specialised test facility, which I do not have access to.

I am happy to use the results to dictate my driving methods for the future.

Best wishes

Tog

[Gorch]

I don't want to save any battery for city driving.

Given that I would recommend starting battery fully charged and just cruise ahead in normal mode and ECO on. Once you consider a break, plan to park at a power station for fast load while picking up your coffee. You'd need a parking slot anyway. Why not loading at the same time? Then continue cruising as above. That'll work simply and perfectly.

In case you know the route and want to invest more responsibility to city driving or any kind of slow passages in between. Consider full battery start and driving until the battery is in a low range. Then select Charge mode to collect power for slow driving passages on the route or city driving.

On a really long route it might be interesting to toggle Save and Charge loading to max 60% battery power.

Overall goal is to finish up with an empty battery.

Personally, I'm not using the ECO mode at all and prefer silent e-driving at low speeds.

[Togfather]

Thanks for your interesting input.

I don't do any city driving and motorway driving is quite rare for me, although I made that trip twice just as an experiment.

I live in the middle of nowhere and my normal driving is to and from a small town around 13 miles away on a bendy rural road, which takes about 35 minutes.

There is a free charging point in the town and I can often drive from there to my home and back again on a single charge, so get amazing MPG with little or no charging cost. I do occasionally charge at home if the charging point in town is busy or if I don't have time to wait.

I drove for 1700 miles with an average of 138 mpg, so this is not only the smoothest car I have ever owned but also the cheapest to run.

I am a very happy bunny indeed