^ Good question. It has been discussed, and in neutral, your engine is idleing. While gliding, your engine is spinning, but no gas is flowing to it. You use less gas gliding.

 

I don't believe that the early failure is due to any hypermiling techniques. Mostly because I drive the HCH more like a regular car, than I do trying to hypermile. Most of my driving is 5 miles each way so there isn't as much of a chance to P&G, etc. Typically in the winter, it takes me 2/3 of the drive to where I'm going before the engine is even warmed up enough to do any of that. I will try to glide down the hills and into the straight away until such point where I'd drop below the speed limit. I did buy the insulation to shove into the grill, but I haven't gotten around to it just yet....it's become one of those items like the painting at my house....I just haven't gotten to it haha. I'm sure I will sometime, hopefully before "winter" is over. It's hard to say winter, as we just set a record for temp here today, topping out around 70.

 

Well, I got my baby back on Thursday. She's running good as new, and actually seems to be smoother coming out of auto-stop. I'm not sure what they did, but my FE went from 38 to 28 when I got the car back. Now I gotta bring it back up. Unfortunately, they didn't list the "price" that it would have been to do such repair. I would imagine it was atleast 2K given that a normal transmission would have been around that cost to replace.

 

They always do that...
They need to idle the engine, and rev it in park. They also test drive it (or at least they should), which tends to bring it down.