What would be the best strategy for a 66 mile commute?

Depends on the price of electricity as well, as some states (CA for instance) have high electricity costs so sometimes you can end up paying more since electric on highway isn't optimal, especially in the cold with heater on.

But just drive how you want, you might end up using more gas but its likely not a big difference in pricing either way, and it allows you to make a trip to the store or something in all electric if needed. If you have a L2 charger then you can get a fast charge, but for me I'd rather have a few extra miles electric left than have to use gas just to go a few miles

 

I'd be inclined to use just enough HV on the highway to do the rest in EV; e.g. on the way home, use HV on the highway until the EV range guess-o-meter is about the same as your distance to home. The nice thing about the Clarity, though, is that you don't have to worry - you won't harm the battery by running it down.

 

I’ve pondered this same question with regards to maximum EV economy vs “babying” the battery. Someone posted that depth of discharge on a Li-ion battery was a factor in battery longevity. So even though the BMS will not let the battery be completely drained when you get to 0 EV/2 bars, I seldom let it do so. Instead I will manually switch to HV when around 4 bars or so to try to lessen my depth of discharge. This also may have helped me never to have heard the angry bees. Who knows if it’s really doing that or if it is really better for the battery? Can’t say for sure, but it can’t hurt and makes me feel better and only costs a few miles of EV.

 

Potentially. With minimal battery charge in HV mode, the car becomes a bit of a slug. A car that doesn't accelerate very quickly when a sleepy semi driver is behind you and moving faster than you isn't very convenient

 

It's fun to try to arrive home with just a couple of EV miles remaining. BEV drivers suffer extreme range anxiety when this happens, but we Clarity PHEV drivers only have to worry about engine anxiety (the fear of causing the engine to start).

 

I would drive in HV mode until the EV mode has enough range to get me home with one or two miles to spare. I don't like restarting the cold ICE to go one or two blocks.

 

With gasoline being $183.9 per gallon I have been thinking of just running the car in the HV mode on the highway and EV in town.

 

At these prices I just try not to be too concerned. As others have suggested, I just take my EV range down to some convenient number - usually 20, 15 or 10 miles remaining - then switch to HV and run that way until the appropriate distance from home and switch back to EV.

But, again, with gas this cheap it’s more a fun game to play. Plus I guess it helps the planet in some tiny way!

 

I have a 60 mile commute (30 miles each way) and drive the entire way to work in EV. It is slightly downhill that way and gets much better mileage than the return leg. I then use HV for about 10 miles on the highway on the way home, and end up with a couple miles of battery left when I pull in the driveway. If I have errands to run when I get home, I'll run the ICE a little bit longer to make sure I have enough for that too. That way I'm only running the ICE once each day. It has worked great so far.

 

Same here I don’t want the gas engine to restart. For road trips I go to hv mode immediately with full charge and stay there until I am within ev range of a charge stop. I’ll leave the car on at the fuel stop and keep fingers crossed the gas engine doesn’t start during fueling. Each time you power the car off and back on you have to go back into hv and you lose a little ev range.

 

The other problem I've seen is that if traffic becomes slow, the car will switch to EV mode in stop and go, and you have more engine restarts.

 

I am not confident of the information that we have available in terms of the correlation between discharge level and battery life. My inclination would be to take the Honda engineers' parameters and not worry about battery degradation. For me, the consideration is more that I like to have enough battery capacity to be able to drive in EV around town, simply because I find that mode more pleasant. So I tend to run in HV on the highway and leave plenty of battery for EV non-highway if that's feasible.

 

Now thats some expensive gas!

 

Option 1: Drive the car without any thought to modes.
Option 2: Experiment and see what uses the least gas. Take note of temperature changes and such or it will mess with your experimentation.
Option 3: Convince your work to install EV Chargers. Find if there are rebates if they do in their area, etc. Then you can be 100% EV both directions

My only comment is it is wasteful to arrive home with EV charge as you aren't using the full potential of wall electricity.

 

I have a similar problem. 75 mile RT commute, charger only at work (I live in NYC, and the garage I use charges outrageous amounts for charging but I have free charging at work). I'm going to be doing a bit of option 2.

I do wish that the Clarity (with its GPS) could learn the commute, and take a guess as to how to minimize cost given a price/KWh, price/Gallon, and knowledge of the route, typical traffic, and then just do the mode switching for me.

 

For a lot of us who bought this car, it is because we get free charge from our company, gas or electric mileages don't have too much difference for us in CA. Also we get a nice car cheap, we get to drive in the carpool lane,

 

Heh. With the amount of computing power in the car, it strains to just run the display.

But I do find your idea intriguing. Maybe we're seeing the next level of sophistication.