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I'm pretty skeptical that carburetors are the magic key to high fuel efficiency. I'm sure EPA regs have an impact, but I think it's mostly consumer habits and expectations. Safety design has definitely added to weight, but power has gone up even faster. Improvements in engine efficiency has gone to make engines more powerful, because, hey, why not? Gas is cheap enough and more power is more fun. 15 years ago my thermodynamics prof was seriously pissed that all the improvements in engine efficiency were being erased by changes in fleet composition. It looks like changes to the CAFE regs are going to put so many incentives on smaller/lighter/hybrid cars to change that fleet composition back a bit.

I think it is tied to one of the two trip meters. I reset one of the trip meters while driving and that reset.

In my FFH manual, it gives the first oil change as 16000km (though I've been thinking of doing it earlier). The car does have an oil change warning, or at least it's in the manual.

If you are burning gas but not moving forward, then your litres per 100km is infinite. It doesn't mean that you are burning a huge amount of gas. Similarly, if you are going slow and the engine is running (mostly charging the battery), then your instant fuel economy can be poor.

Mainly it's that it has to warm up the engine and the catalytic converter to operating temperatures. For the regen, I think it might be a bit of a warm up period on it as well. The regenerative brakes can dump a lot of power into the battery very quickly. I suspect the system tries to avoid that in the first minute or so after startup, probably to preserve battery life. As for not happening on the first day, it was probably warmed up before you left the dealer. Probably before you even got in. If it doesn't have too long to cool off, then the warmup period is much shorter or skipped. One thing to keep in mind is that EV mode is not free. The energy to power EV mode comes from the engine when it's running. In your short trip, unless it was downhill, the 72 mpg is not a true accounting since you probably left the battery at a lower charge level than when you started. It takes gas to bring that back up. The flip side of this is that having the car run the engine for the first few minutes is not all wasted gas either, as it can charge up the battery during this period, so you can have better gas mileage during the next section of your trip. Besides, the engine has to warm up to operate efficiently, so if you didn't go through the warm up period you would never get good mileage. This applies to all cars, but you probably didn't worry about it because you weren't being told the mileage every minute.

Really? I thought the tires on the FFH were 'low rolling resistance' versions.

I'm sure he means that new FFH's won't have this ignition within a couple of years, not that the existing ignitions are likely to fail earlier than any other car.

I think that the black box is probably the best option at this point to get to the root of the problem. I'm just surprised (read: dumbfounded) that the existing error-reporting system says nothing is wrong.

I don't understand how the vehicle could be having so many problems and not generate a code. Is it possible that some of the processors get into a bad error state and clear the codes when they reset? Or when it's malfunctioning the data connections are so messed up it can't properly record an error? You'd really think that such obvious problems would leave error codes all over the place.

Would you mind telling us what sort of driving you do? 200 hours for 5000 miles is only an average of 25 mph, and when I'm driving that slow, the ICE is off a good portion of the time.

I had a chance to test the snow handling today in a 1 hour trip that turned into 2.5 hours due to snow. Stop and go traffic, deep slush, imposing ridges between lanes and pickups fishtailing around (and quite a few vehicles in the ditch). I'm sure the condition of the tires helps a lot, but the FFH felt quite solidly planted. Testing the ABS it seemed pretty smooth. Also 5.8l/100km (40.5 MPG), so there's that too.

Are you sure about this last bit? I know Toyota says they will do this for new versions of other cars, but I've read that the Prius already had it. I mean, just like in the FFH, MG2 acts as both brake and motor. To me, just the way the eCVT works you'd have to have an override as part of the basic design.

Ok, that's very helpful. I hadn't considered the scenarios the load limit would have to cover.

I picked up a 2010 Fusion Hybrid (Brilliant Silver) last week and I'm quite happy with it so far. One thing I found a bit disconcerting though was the passenger+payload limit listed on the door sticker. I have just the Moons and Tunes package and mine is listed as just 850 lbs. Now, for a 5-seat vehicle, that seem fairly low to me. Five guys at a reasonably trim average weight of 180lbs each is already 50lbs over the limit and that's not even counting anything in the trunk! Looking online, the difference between curb weight and gross vehicle weight rating for most cars of similar size seems to be about 1100-1200lbs. For the Fusion Hybrid it's a tad under 1000 lbs. So it looks as though the hybrid components do eat a bit into the payload limit. Now 5 guys in the car is not my typical commute and I don't envision using the fusion to cart around iron ore or something, but 850lbs seems as though I would go over the limit with fairly normal use scenarios. So I guess my question is, how seriously should I take this limit?