1,939 mile roundtrip, some interesting data

[Bad Dolphin]

I did something similar over the past two weeks - 4000 miles round-trip, using I-70 for half of that. Yes, speed really impacts efficiency. Going above 75 mph and you almost add an additional 30-minute charge vs. 65, so you lose the benefit of speed. It's tough not to go fast in an MME (and there's an additional kW/mi hit in a GT), especially through Kansas. Wind also had a serious impact - in western Kansas, sustained wind speed was 40 mph, with gusts up to 55, all south to north, so it was a crosswind. I saw efficiency down to 1.6 kW/mi at 75 mph (temp not an issue).

Wind is always important! When towing our Airstream with our Sprinter, our well tuned rig handled it well, but a tail wind increased our mpg by up to 50% while either crosswind or headwinds would knock off about 25%. I suspect that the crosswinds took off so much because the Sprinter had superb correcting software that braked the different corners to keep the rig stable. We were also pretty stoked about the Airstream's, low profile and low center of gravity along with a carefully tuned weight distributing hitch making for a solid, stable rig.

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[dimes4slim]

My globe says otherwise. Did you consider that going DOWN to South Carolina was downhill, and back UP to Michigan was clearly uphill. That certainly distorts your numbers.

 

[Mark813]

I use my previous non hybrid Toyota RAV4 as a comparison baseline. That 1900 mile trip at 25mpg would have used 76 gallons of gas at $4 per gallon for $304 vs the $166 in electric you paid.

Road trip gas is probably higher than Central Florida and ice mpg varies

 

[Richard in Charlotte]

Drove from cold Michigan to warm South Carolina.

I guess we were keeping things in balance. We went from NC to Michigan. We passed that Bush's plant on the way home on Saturday.

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