I had this coming home from Loveland Basin yesterday. The car was COLD when we started with temps in the single degrees (although I do not remember the fWT). After a short drive through the parking lot, we merged onto stop and go traffic on I-70 where I was using L gear to maintain speed and quickly had 60+ SoC. That meant that it kept using Electric Drive for propulsion and the tach stayed about 2500rpm on the ICE.

The fWT slowly climbed up to 172 degrees, but it wouldn't go into auto stop. I tried low gear, drive and neutral, all with no success. All this time, we were in 5-10mph traffic and I was getting about 30mpg on the iFCD which seemed very low to me (for warming up the engine and using electric drive). Finally by Idaho Springs, some 20 downhill miles later, I saw the first auto stop. From that point on, my iFCD mileage was a lot better.

I don't have gauges like cat temp or battery temp loaded so I can't comment on their status, but I was surprized and frustrated that the first 20 miles of the best mpg road in the state were lost. Next time I will warm the car up in the parking lot before merging into traffic! Any thoughts on which gauges I should program to check this next time?

Commuter car, grocery getter, and summer road tripper--average 10k miles per year.


Winter road trips and ski trips, bad weather commuter and my wife's "daily" driver--expected average 4k miles per year.