Escaping some of the summer time heat with a trip to the mountains. 1658 miles total, 38.1 gallons gas, = 43.5mpg (43.3 indicated). Gas averaged around $2.50 gallon ($94.97) so about .05 cent/mile. No charging on trip and started with full battery that was slowly being depleted until I forgot to get back into HV mode after one stop on the first day (grrrr). Did lots of steep mountain grade driving in HV mode with little battery (2-4 bars) with little drama. Yes, you hear the ICE running higher than "usual". Gained as much as 15 miles EV from regen on the longest steep downhill leg. Usually drove in Sport mode with 4 chevrons regen set. Two long days driving (750 mile legs @ 11 hours each); got a little stiff towards the end of the day as one would expect but otherwise very comfortable for both driver and passenger. Fuel range was never an issue even out in very remote west Texas/east New Mexico. Most of those long legs were at steady 75-85 mph speeds till empty. Rinse, lather, repeat all day long. Got low fuel warning at around 30 miles and 2 bars left but drove another 30 miles after those fuel bars disappeared. This was the fill up: I even did 2-3 short stints at 100mph on the long straights in west Texas to put some distance between me and some hazardous drivers so I find the overall mileage of 43mpg to be incredibly impressive. There was no readily available public charging on the route nor destination and the Tesla trip planner couldn't calculate a route ("We're working on it."). Love this car!
My wife has a cousin with a 2013 Volt. He often asks if her can charge his low battery when overnight at a hotel. When ther front desk person asks if his car is a Tesla, he just no, " it is just a Chevy". They usually let him charge!
wondered if you used the adaptive cruise control and lane assist all the time and did you think they made the trip much easier?
Great question. I was going to mention that in the OP but forgot. YES!, ACC and LKA were both very helpful in reducing the driving load over the 11 hour legs. I've come to think of LKA as an extra power steering level that requires less physical steering effort. It's a small reduction but it really adds up as the hours go by. I found on the long straights that keeping my hand on the wheel was enough to keep LKA active; even tho' I'd still get the pop up notifications, it would reinitiate almost immediately with no real input from me other than the weight of my hand on the wheel+steering deflection(s) at those speeds. IOW, I quit trying to add a steering input each time it requested it. These warnings popped up about every :08 secs at those high speeds FWIW. I turned off LKA in very curvy areas or when the roads didn't have painted lines (very common) as it would get either overwhelmed or irritate me in those conditions. There were also some times where the painted outside line of the right lane on the interstate was frequently paved over by repairs due to being highly used; especially trucks. This caused LKA to continually turn off/on so when traffic allowed I would "left lane camp" to keep it activated. We did notice towards the end of the trip that ACC was sometimes a little slower to pick up the vehicle ahead of us. My guess was the radar cover was getting too thick with bugs and road grime from some light rain that wasn't heavy enough to clean things. Oh, another data point: tires were adjusted to 40/38 psi f/r before leaving.
The radar cover issue isn’t unique to the Clarity. We were on a trip in The Wife’s CRV when the dashboard lit up like a Christmas Tree and all of the automatic systems shut off (ACC, LKAS). I remembered that snow gunked up my Clarity so cleaned off the radar cover and was all set. I always use ACC and Sport mode because the ACC takes too long to accelerate in a normal drive mode.
