Wow
What a treat. . . . averaged 42 mpg at 80-85 mph!

No troubles except the battery charge indicator started doing really weird things, like going almost all the way down, now its showing 5 bars when I start up the car - but I've moved from MD to CA and the environments are totally different.

time to take her in for her 60,000 mile service. She's getting along in years. . . . .

I hope she'll last 'forever'.

 

Awesome! That's great FE for the HAH at those speeds. Generally when I average 42 MPG, I'm only averaging 70 MPH.

I'm not sure why the car does that with the charge indicator. I've seen it a few times myself while driving down the interstate. One minute I'm at 4 bars, the next I'm at 1, and then finally I'm back up at 4 bars again after a few minutes with the charge light on just slightly. And it's all on flat lands.

 

Yes, that IS awesome FE! Not sure if you saw my post a few weeks ago but I drove an '07 HAH from NY to AZ and averaged about 32 mpg. My best highway tank was 34.5. I drove at similar speeds. I'm curious, do you compare the car's avg FE (indicator) with your odometer and actual gallons used? If so, are they pretty close?

My charge bars usually sit at 4, occasionally dropping to 3 but generally not much action there.

 

32 sounds low. I routinely exceed 38 mpg on highway in my 2006 HAH. I have seen 42+ a few times as well. Do you use cruise control on highway?

 

All my fuel economy (FE) calculations are done by miles divided by gallons.

I do notice the miles/gallons method, the fuel consumption display (FCD), and the odometer display are all usually within about 1 MPG. Sometimes I see a difference of up to about 2 MPG, but that's not too often. I don't recall where the FCD and odometer display both get their values from, but it's variances is due to fuel metering sensitivity. When I can figure out where I put my service manual, I'll look it up and post it here.

 

Yes (gonehiking), I usually do use my CC. My rather poor FE I think was from fairly high speeds and heavy head winds - my earlier post "Just checking in". But hyaena85 did 10 mpg better at about the same speed on the cross-country trip. I am pretty blown away by that FE and I think it's great. The new car sticker (on my '07) indicated 35 mpg highway and I think I could typically get that going 75 mph or less.

Some of you might've seen the recent story about Honda getting sued because their cars odometers were inaccurate. I think the story indicated it was for a range of 2 or 3 years (something like '02 to '04). The charge (or possible motive) mentioned was that Honda was trying to get warranty coverage ended sooner or perhaps this allowed for better (bogus) FE numbers. Whatever they were doing left a bad taste - I have an '03 S2000 and I really think Honda makes great cars. They're too good to just accidentally get odometer scaling messed up (IMO).

 

I think the lawsuit was actually saying the odometers were reading high by 2% to 4%. But Honda settled out of court by giving a mileage based extension on warranties and leases by 5%. If your odometer is off by 2% you'd show 36,720 on the odo when you actually only drove 36,000 miles. And if your odometer was off by 4% you'd show 37,440 when you actually drove 36,000. For a general tank of fuel for our cars, let's say 450 miles (I usually fill up with about 15 gallons when my car is empty, and I've averaged 30 MPG over 48K miles), reading high by 2 to 4 % means my 30 MPG calculated tank was actually 29.4 to 28.9 MPG.

I didn't read through the whole website, but I seem to remember that Honda didn't manufacture these odometers. They were outsourced. But since the odometers were in Honda cars, they were sued, and not the odometer manufacturer. http://www.odosettlementinfo.com

 

Good point (bar10dah) regarding the odometers being manufactured by a company other than Honda. I wonder though since so many things in the cars nowadays are electronic in nature often with software involved, could their odometers be "scaled" via software? I'm pretty sure my company truck (an '03 Silverado), had it's odometer software adjusted when larger tires were put on it. I guess I should reserve judgement but it seems someone at Honda would've caught this since this error was apparently on many of their vehilces for many years. I think that our HAH's are okay but I'm going to check it out next time I'm on a road with mileage markers.

 

I'd think it would be very hard to detect a 2-4% difference by using mile markers. Even where I lived in AZ, there was a strip of road near several manufacturer's test tracks that had an odometer test zone that was marked off from 0 to 10 miles, and it was hard to say there was a discernable difference when I hit the 10 miles marker post. For anyone else that lives in the Phoenix area, the road I'm talking about is (US-60) Grand Ave in Whittman, after it leaves Sun City West on it's way to Wickenburg. I wasn't able to comfortably say mine was off using the mile posts, but if you want to drive up there, you can check yours out for yourselves. I think it would be easier to do with a GPS. I have a Garmin Forerunner that's pretty accurate, I just haven't had the inclination to get out and retest my odometer lately.

I don't think the odometer is adjustable at all. I'm thinking it gets it's calculations from the miles per hour sensors and compares the data against an internal clock. Your truck's speedo was adjusted to compensate for the larger tires, not the odometer (at least, not directly). So if the Honda odometers were really off 2-4%, and you were able to recalibrate the speedometer, the odometer would still be off by some variable of 2-4%. All this is guessing. I could be way off.

 

That's a terrific MPG for that speed, congrat's. I was pretty proud of myself for getting 40.1 for a whole tank, but I hardly ever enjoyed those speeds. Still, 40.1 over 607 miles leaves me smiling.