Actually, noflash, I thought your post was very well written and made some excellent and *reasonable* points. (This is just a very tough place to say even the most reasonable of "negative" things about the HCH II.)
Seats -- yep. Apart from my Jeep Liberty, these are the worst seats for long-distance driving I've ever encountered in a car. You don't need a Bimmer to have comfortable seats for hours on end -- every Chevy and Pontiac I've had did. You can't exactly test-drive seats for long-distance endurance -- the HCH's only start to hurt me after about 8 hours. (I frequently take 10-15 hour trips.) So this isn's something you can assess as you're buying the car. But it's there. I disagree pretty strongly with posters here who have equated your Bimmer-seat comments to "well, what do you expect from a 22k car?" I expect seats that don't make my butt numb after 4 hours, and it's not hard to do, but the HCH doesn't.
Power-at-speed -- yep. I've maintained from day one with this car that the "rubber-band" effect of the CVT combined with low torque makes *maintaining* a given speed without the CC more difficult than in any other car I've ever driven. You can't just plant your foot and then lightly modulate the throttle to maintain speed. The car only responds to very significant manual throttle inputs. Without them, it "gets behind" and then only ludicrously high revs will get it to actually *accelerate* the 3-5
mph you now need to get back to your desired speed. Then you inevitably wind up "overshooting" the speed you mean to achieve. The CC actually does a fabulous job of maintaining speed -- orders of magnitude better than I can -- but of course for whatever the reason, as observed in other threads, it's been programmed to rev the engine an extra grand high on hills and stay out of the IMA (we've speculated that this is because it's "conserving" battery because it can't see whether a hill is 400 yards or 4 miles long), making it pretty inefficient.
I think this effect bothers most people on this board very little because most people here aren't "cruise control" drivers who like to maintain a given speed. We're much more a crowd who goes at the lower end of speeds traffic is doing, tries to stay out of the way, and lets conditions (grade, roads, wind/weather) modulate our speed. You don't notice the rubber-band effect so much when you're driving this way -- it just seems to "blend in" to the rhythm of the drive.
Mileage -- yep. It can be very "normal" on a road-trip. Though if the grades and winds work in your favor, it can be really stellar. I've gotten 50+ mpg across the length of Wyoming running 80
mph, and then 41 mpg going the other direction. I get comparatively *terrible* mileage in (I'm not making this up) Nebraska -- I-80 -- never bested 42 mpg in either direction. I've never been able to figure out why. My average road trip mileage is something like 43 mpg (which is with a very lightly loaded car and just me in it) -- this from the car that can get me 55 mpg on my standard 30-minute highway commute.
Regarding mileage, I do tend to maintain that if you put a non-hybrid in exactly the same position, it's not going to make its EPA est. either, so your "35 mpg" Ford Focus is highly unlikely to make 35 mpg in situations where my HCH II can only make 40. (We tend to compare apples and oranges when we compare EPA ests of non-hybrids to actuals of hybrids.) But I don't have good data to back that up.
Anyway, I was kind of disappointed to see people rag on your post a little, because I thought it was fair and a reasonable match to my experiences too. I *love* the car, but it's not like I think its exhaust don't stink. . . .
cheers --
doug