Damage Done

My trip back from Palm Coast yesterday went very smoothly, other than some bad rain leaving the coast that cleared up as I headed inland.

I'm actually quite pleased with my mileage. This is what I ended up with after driving straight to campus. Note that I held 6 battery miles on the highway to use when I exited near my office to attend Professor Andy Ray's bon voyage party before his sabbatical and then expertly running out of battery as I pulled into the parking lot at work with, gassing a couple of hundred feet to the charging station before one of our wonderful faculty members, Mahendra, drive us over to the party a few miles away.

Obviously the 14.5 kWh used is due to my having charged for almost 3 hours, as my battery only depleted 11.1 kWh at a time before showing empty. 

4.4 miles traveled per kWh is by far not my best - that being closer to 5.5 miles per kWh. But, given that around 35 of those miles were on the highway, I can't really complain. I also had to run the air through most of the highway route due to the rain, and that never helps.

I also got over 38 mpg using gasoline, and that was pure highway driving. Not bad when you consider that the generator does not perform its best on the highway as it is simply charging the battery and the electric engine performs best in stop-and-go traffic. On city streets, I would have gotten well over 40mpg - probably closer to 42.

The combined mpg of 88.4 for a trip that was a little more than half made on battery power is enticing to any driver, I should hope.

All of this is well and good, but traveling on gasoline is never going to help one's ranking on VoltStats.

Remember that the day I left town I was at #78 on the leaderboard with an average mpg of 758-ish. Now I've dropped almost 80 places with an mpg well under 500. I'm going to utilize this as a challenge to drive NOTHING but battery miles until I can return to my former glory, such as it was, and surpass the top-75 mark to boot.

Next road trip is next week - and we are taking the hubby's gas-guzzler. Not because I'm crazy when it comes to my Volt (although I'm not arguing that point) - but because we need to haul 5 people and beach supplies down the southeastern coastline of Florida, and the Volt is only a four seater.