My better half took our HCH 2 for her first trip too visit her Mother. The trip is over mountainous hyways. She phoned to complain that the car tends to free-wheel on steep grades. 6% with alot of slow to 30 kil.corners. With the old car[98 Altima] she would delete O.D. and the compression would pretty well keep thing under contol with some braking for corners. She was concered she would heat-up the brakes. I told her to use drive 2 when she needed engine help on hills during her return trip. Hope this helps! I suppose this is due to the engine management for good FE? Have any of you found this to be a concern? H

 

I presume you mean that you want to use the engine for braking. The HCH doesn't do it. When you take your foot off the gas pedal to coast downhill, the engine valves are shut off to cut your fuel use to zero. The good news is that the HCH compensates for the lack of engine braking by using regen to charge up the batteries. You can increase the braking power by shifting to S gear, which will make the engine rev higher and produce more regen. The disadvantage with the small battery pack is that you soon reach a full charge. I find that this happens after an elevation drop of about 500 feet. After that, no regen, no engine braking. You're burning asbestos for the remainder of the descent. Even if you keep your gear in S and the engine revving high, with the valves shut you get very little engine drag.

 

I haven't found this to be a problem, but the wife did not like it at all! She will have to learn to live with it, because I'm keeping it

 

Harold, when it comes to that kind of driving regime, I don't envy you at all.

Come to think about it... living in the prairie provinces is pretty good even if the winters do not appear that way. I miss the BC scenery though.

Cheers;

MSantos

 

I'll be heading out to Sk. in a few weeks so I'll give the HCH a test going through the Rockies. I enyoy the prairie provinces and the great people that live thier, H

 

The other day I was driving down a very long and steep hill on the highway, and using cruise control. The battery went full half-way down, but then the amazing thing happened that the rpms went up a bit, and it seemed also to open the valves or something because the engine braking increased somewhat as well. It very clearly tried to keep the speed down using what other means were available.

Anyone else seen this? Does it only happen when using cruise control? I haven't seen it before.

 

That is interesting. Will watch for that when the wife comes home with the car. It would be great if once the battery was fully charged the surplus charge would continue into a bank of resistors. That way you would still have electric motor for some braking. To be truthfull, I haven't noticed it differant from any other car , but the wife did not like it.

 

Cruise control does seem to do some extra braking somehow, IMO

 

That's a very good point. Cruise control needs some way of controlling the speed when the battery is chock full and you're flying down the side of a mountain. What would cruise try to do at that point? I'm sure the first thing it would do is shift the CVT as low as it can safely go. Then what? Would it restart the engine? Honda had to have thought of this. Any of you mountain dwellers ever try heading down a long, long slope with cruise set at 50 mph to see what happens when the battery peaks?

 

Cruise control commonly does its job by adjusting only the throttle - simulating a foot on the gas pedal. I'd be surprised if it does anything else.