Driving a Hybrid

Some friends of ours recently purchased a new Chevrolet Malibu Hybrid automobile. I've enjoyed hearing of their driving experience and ended up reading about hybrid sedans in general. That led to  our finding that Hertz rents hybrid sedans and has an especially good rate for the weekends.

We drove out to the airport late on a Friday night and rented a Ford Fusion Hybrid sedan for two days. It turned out to be a nice automobile. The EPA ratings are 43 mpg in town and 41 mpg on the highway.  Zero to Sixty is about 8 seconds using the combined gas and electric modes.

We drove the car about 400 miles and got as high as 57.5 mpg for one segment of around town driving and as low as 38.6 mpg driving 70 mph into a 30 mph headwind. Our average for the entire trip was 44.5 mpg.

The car has a battery in the trunk that will allow the car to run on electric power under certain conditions. By careful use of the accelerator pedal you can cause the car to select electric (EV) mode to use no gasoline wile driving. The trick is to use EV mode as much as possible while driving.

When the car is decelerating the energy normally turned into useless heat by the brakes is instead turned into electricity to recharge the on-board battery.

The display screen on the left shows  the average fuel use for this particular segment of our drive.  The three blue horizontal bars are coaches for your driving techniques with more color meaning better efficiency in driving in the various models of Acceleration, Braking and Cruising. According to these screens I was doing pretty well with my driving technique. 

The right hand screen in this image shows vertical bars that indicate the fuel economy history for each 5 minute segment of the drive. The left hand image shows that for this particular 25 mile segment 13.4 miles of it were driven using the electric motor only.

With gas prices low and SUV's and Pickup trucks as popular as they are the demand for these cars is pretty low and as a result they sell for especially good prices, both new and used. Based on our experience I can recommend one if you want to save some fuel and drive a late model car at a good price.