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So my dad and I went to the Ecoboost Challenge in Minneapolis this past weekend. It was incredibly disappointing. Below are some of my comments I put on the follow-up survey which explain why I was so disappointed. To expound on my comments about the Hypermile Challenge I'll explain a bit about how it was structured for those who didn't go to an event. It was a 1/2 mile loop. The Ford Eco Coach riding with your would reset the MPG on the Empower display before you set off. Then you had to accelerate up to 25 MPH minimum and keep it there for the straightaway. Then there was a wide loop at the far end where you could almost keep up a 25 MPH speed but were allowed to slow down. Then you had to accelerate back up to 25 MPH before hitting the final straight. Then you'd loop around back to the staging area using regen braking to stop. Once you stopped they would read your MPG off the Empower screen and report that as your result. They would keep track of the highest scores each hour and then at the end of every hour they'd have a drive-off between those two leaders with the winner receiving a prize. Sony sponsored the event and they were giving away "$300 Sony headphones" or at least that's how the event employees described them. The rules were that you had to use some gas, results of 999.9 were possible but not accepted. They had 4 vehicles, 2 Fusions and 2 C-Maxes. There were results from earlier in the day where people got as high as 800 MPG. This means they started with a very high SOC so that when the ICE did come on accelerating it hardly used any gas. Contrarily, when I drove the car started with an SOC so low that there was no threshold on the Empower screen, as soon as I touched the gas the ICE came on. This also meant that the ICE was incredibly loaded up charging the HVB and that when I let my foot off the gas to coast the car slowed down more quickly than normal since it was trying to put energy back into the battery. This meant that instead of getting results in the hundreds of MPGs I only managed 69.6 MPG. This was all vehicle dependent too, other vehicles that had higher SOCs were returning results of 100+ at the same time that I could only get 69.6. To compare, the previous hour winners did their drive off in the same FFH I drove right before me and only got results in the 40s, likely with the same low SOC. I regret the fact that I didn't clue into this earlier on so that I could have set myself up with a better starting SOC by specifically requesting a certain vehicle based on previous results. There also was a section of the survey for general comments about Ford. In that box I said: I'm curious to hear from others who went to an event in their locale to see what they thought and if they experienced the same long lines and scam of a hypermile challenge that we did.