That's right folks, you heard it here: it's possible to spend hours and hours looking for ways to administer tender loving care to your HCH (and it's fuel efficiency) and NOT see a change in your MPGs. Take my example:
I was driving home from work today - I work right smack downtown, mind you - out to my apartment which just so happens to be one of the highest-volume routes in what was just rated America's "5th-Worst Traffic City" - Jacksonville isn't quite to Atlanta yet but we are closing in, I assure you, and out of nowhere, a violent squall of torrential downpours, 30 miles per hour headwinds off the river and ocean both, lightning, thunder, pandemonium. The six lanes all stopped simultaneously. What is a healthy 20 minute commute turned into an 80 minute bleary-eyed stop-and-go gale-force weather rat race at a torrid 15-20 MPH, bumper to bumper for miles and miles and miles. This is the day that 2 months ago, would and did easily take my MPG down from, say, 50 to 45 a full 4/5 of the way through a tank. It happens to us all; that 15 minute stretch where you can spend a gallon and get 5 miles, the nightmare even a hybrid wasn't built for.
But the nightmare a hybrid can be driven for. Oh I balled that jack into neutral on the slightest of hills and kicked it back to drive for my stops. At each break in the movement I waited and waited patiently for a gap long enough to get my autostop back, and when worse came to worse (only twice!), I rebooted. Yessir I sat and sat and sat and jumped and stopped and sat and sat and sat in 95 degree heat and roads that were 4 inches full of water after the first 10 minutes and never let up. After a grueling stint that talllied nearly an hour and a half in the worst of conditions for literally everything - tires, autostop, AC, the works - I pulled into my driveway at the same 48.4 MPG I left work with. Thank you, Green Hybrid.