My Mileage Can Beat Your Mileage!
Harnessing Americans’ competitiveness to save the planet
July / August 2003
By Bill McKibben, Orion
I just drove 459 miles round trip to speak at an environmental conference. I could probably report all the wise things that people had to say during the weekend’s proceedings, but instead I want to boast: 60.9! That’s how many miles per gallon I got coming and going.
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That’s thanks to my new Honda Civic hybrid, of course—a car indistinguishable in appearance from all the millions of other Honda Civics, except that it almost never stops at gas stations. But to me the niftiest thing about the car is not its four-cylinder engine, or its trunk-mounted battery pack, or its regenerative braking that charges those batteries every time I put on the brake. It’s the gauge that lets me know exactly how many miles I am getting per gallon.
Mounted on the dashboard, right next to the speedometer, the gauge constantly tells you your current gas mileage and your average for the trip. When you start down a steep hill and gravity’s doing all the work, it shoots cheerfully up to its max, 120 miles per gallon. When you start up a hill, the electric battery kicks in to help the gas engine, and the little gauge drops dishearteningly down to, say, 40 miles per gallon. Every tenth of a mile, it recalculates your average. Near the start of a trip, the average swings wildly—one hill up or down can raise or drop it by 10 m.p.g. After 400 miles, though, you’d need to climb a continental divide to shake up the average.
Does it sound like I pay inordinate attention to the gas gauge? Absolutely. And is it because I’m obsessed with global warming? Not really. True, that’s why I bought the car in the first place, paid the two grand extra it costs to get the hybrid engine. But if you thought about global warming all the time, you’d be nuts. When I’m behind the wheel, I’m as competitive as any other American. As I pull out of the driveway, I think about whether I can beat my last trip. Will I make it home averaging 60, or is the last hill on Route 125 going to knock me under? My Civic is only supposed to get 52 m.p.g., but I’ve got that beat cold.
And it turns out that I’m not alone in this mild obsession. Almost from the day the first hybrids from Honda and Toyota [the Prius hybrid model] came off the boat from Japan, drivers have found themselves pushing to get the maximum mileage. Their crowing fills one Web page after another. John Johnson in Michigan, for instance, bought his Insight, Honda’s other hybrid model, not for environmental reasons but simply because it was the latest cool thing. Now he calls himself “Insightman” and his vanity plate reads IGO ECO. He reports that on those days when other cars are scarce and he can really slow down going up hills, he can break 80 miles per gallon. “On the first leg of my 82 m.p.g. personal record 15-mile round trip to work,” he writes, “I achieved an amazing 91.1 m.p.g.!”
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