ShawnB- have you checked to be sure you didn't leave your parking brake on?

Man, 28 is LOW! You poor guy.

 

ShawnB - I found out the exact same thing in the last few weeks as I only have 1200miles on my HCHII. My wife was accelerating too slow on hills from a stop light and keeping the engine in the 20mpg range too long. She would get 50 mpg on the way to work with no traffic in the early morning and 28 mpg on the way home for a 38 mpg combined. Here is what I do. Accelerate mildly and use very little assist up to about 10 mph. This is do to the fact that a DC motor will pull maximum amps from a stopped rotor position (ie accelerating from a full stop) and I do not want to drag down the SOC too much. After about 10 mph, I nail the throttle at full assist and about 3500 rpm up until about 30 mph. I can then fully let off the throttle to drop the rpm's back down in the 1200 - 1500 rpm range and get the mpg meter back up to about 70mpg. Obviously this depends on how steep and long the hill is, etc. but around where I live, I can normally drop down the rpms and still maintain enough momenum to make it up the hill near 50 mpg. For most hills if you are not stopped, accelerate going down hill or on the flat to 10 mph over the speed limit and ride the speed up the next hill at over 50 mpg. I have gotten very good at this game now, which is really just using conservation of momentum laws to assist the car. Gravity is working with you if you accelerate going down hill and you will definitely be using much less amperage out of your battery with very little torque needed for acceleration going down hill. If somebody is in front of me and stops me from accelerating going down the hill, I milk the hill for all the regen I can get, then coast longer naturally at 100+ mpg below the speed limit to create space and then accelerate on the flat before the next hill. Either way I am getting energy for use on the hill cheaper than trying to accelerate going up hill. Anyway the bottom line is get the engine out of the low mpg situation as quickly as possible and back up into the 60-70mpg range. The key is to let off the gas fully which starts regen mode, drops the rpm's down below 1500, and the add throttle back until nuetral on the meters. I really don't need to watch the mpg meter that much anymore, as it will pop up over 60 by itself once you get the rpms down around 1500 or below. I think the real reason is that you have changed the gear ratio on the CVT transmition basically into an overdrive ratio where you have very little torque available, but get great mileage with low rpms. Just make sure not to do this before you have enough speed and distance left to ride up the rest of an incline. Hope this helps, my wife is now averaging 45 mpg after she learned this technique and I am well over 50 mpg on a car that is not even broken in yet.