I finally got my first 50+ tank doing a 180 mile trip over the coast range in Oregon to my mother in laws. I didn't know what to expect going over a small mountain range and was impressed. The one crazy experience I had to share was after getting a nice full green battery going down a very long hill. I've had a few full green batteries but this one hit all green bars and I still had a ways to go down. After hitting the bottom I found myself going up a slight incline in electric mode (yellow arrows) at 60MPH for at least a minute at 99MPG. I don't remember how long it took to bleed the battery back to blue but even at the top of the next hill I was still getting around 70 MPG with the standard blue bars. During the full battery incline I even tried accelerating to get out of electric mode and found that I had a good deal of power and could actually accelerate while still in yellow bars. Anyone else seen similar results? Wish I had a bigger battery if a full battery can give you performance like that.
That is normal for a big hill. While the long run in electric was nice, remember that you previously paid for that full battery by burning gas on the uphill side. Tom
Yep, several times descending the Appalachians. In fact, if you do enough downhills like that you might see the second piece of what seems like a paradox: The ICE shuts down easily when you give it a little go-pedal, but it spins up when you let off. Down a long incline with substantial regeneration, it is easy for the battery's maximum state of charge (~80%) to be reached, as you've seen. Once it is reached, the car pulls some of that charge back out to spin up the ICE and to help slow itself instead of allowing more regeneration -- behavior that's very similar to using "B." All part of protecting the battery from overcharging.
You are simply seeing the effects of going downhill. If i drove from Truckee to Sacramento (effectively down hill) I could get over 100mpg I'm sure. I just have to conveniently forget to add the 35-40mpg I go going from Sacramento to Truckee (uphill). lol
