Hi all, I'm curious to read other's thoughts on driving with lots of passengers. I just got back from my first ever road trip in my 2005 Civic (CVT AT-PZEV) where I had 4 passengers (not counting myself) on the way down and 3 on the way back, and a trunk mostly full of not-so-heavy luggage.

Starting the trip, I immediately noticed that the car accelerated very sluggishly (unless, of course, I pushed down the pedal much harder than normal), and since my passengers all wanted A/C and I wanted to keep them all happy, I was afraid that the long trip (a little over 500 miles) would really pull down my average mileage in the long run. Especially since as I started the trip pickup up people in city driving, my mileage display started out around 38 mpg. I just kept driving carefully (and at about 60 or 65 miles per hour, depending on the speed limit), though, and the mileage kept climbing gradually throughout the trip after that, which was pretty much all highway driving; I reached the destination with a display average of 46.5 mpg, which quite surprised me.

On the way back, I ran the A/C with recirculating air, which I had forgotten to do before, and that may have helped a bit, especially since at that time I was also micromanaging the A/C by switching it on and off alot (I wanted to keep my passengers comfortable, but I also really wanted to not run the A/C the whole time if I could get away with it. I really wish the thermostat on the A/C would shut off the compressor from time to time, instead of just adjusting the temperature of the air it's blowing). I managed to get 49.2 mpg on the display until I filled up (since I wasn't sure if I'd quite be able to do the whole trip on one tank, though in hindsight it seems I could have pretty easily), and after that, it took a long time for the mileage to climb back up again, but I finished the last, 86 mile stretch of the trip with an average of 52 mpg.

The weighted average mpg for the trip came out to about 48mpg, and I have to say I'm surprised that I was able to get EPA mileage with so many passengers and with A/C. I'm sure that 36 psi tire pressure (a little extra, though not as high as some go I know) helped, but I still thought I would have taken a bigger performance hit. Another thing that did help, I suppose, was that traffic for the trip was good. (For reference, my mileage without passengers has been getting better and better lately; though I don't try to hypermile all the time I'm always care and I do try to hypermile a bit from time to timer; my last tank was about 53 mpg over 419 miles)

So, any other thoughts or experiences to share about driving with a lot of passengers or less talkative heavy loads?