[flyingron]

I may have missed it, but is there any place the instantaneous MPG and Miles/KW (or some similar unit) displayed?
Seems with all the whiz bang displays it ought to have it. My last two GM trucks had it. All I can find is an average MPG and a total KW used as well as the instantaneous KW in/out.

 

[VoltGuy2014]

The instantaneous MPG is kinda pointless. Tesla doesn't have it either. Prius doesn't give out instantaneous either. But, I know some gas cars like the Honda Pilot, Toyota Highlander shows instantaneous.

Sure for that one second my MPG got 100 mpg going down a hill in the pilot. How will that benefit?

I may have missed it, but is there any place the instantaneous MPG and Miles/KW (or some similar unit) displayed?
Seems with all the whiz bang displays it ought to have it. My last two GM trucks had it. All I can find is an average MPG and a total KW used as well as the instantaneous KW in/out.

 

[saghost]

An instantaneous mpg display on the Volt would be very confusing, unless it somehow biased for energy into/out of the battery.

At times you go charging up a hill on the freeway using twice as much power as normal - but the engine doesn't speed up, because the car has a pool of extra battery power and chose to use that instead. In this case, instant MPG would be wildly high.

Other times you're driving on the flat, and the car decides the best option is to sock away some kWh to use later. In this case, instant MPG would be surprisingly low.

If it was necessary to provide a number for some reason, what you'd have to do is assume an mpg value for stored battery power, and then provide a "actual fuel flow + battery power" number.

It's the Volt. Everything works the way you expect and with remarkable efficiency, but once you scratch under the surface, nothing is ever simple.

 

[jaero]

Our 2012 PriusV does have a display for instantaneous mileage. I agree that it wouldn't be much use on the Volt; it would be redundant to the efficiency ball on the main dash panel which provides a graphical representation of instantaneous power usage as well as energy dissipation during braking.

 

[css28]

I recommend the Power Gauge in the Driver Information Center.

Very helpful in calibrating your accelerator foot for coasting, among other things.

 

[Steverino]

I have an instantaneous mpg display on my Cadillac. I find it unhelpful unless I want to see how truly awful stomping on the accelerator is for gas mileage in the first 6 yards, haha. I pretty much knew that already. Frankly I find the Volt's trip stats and lifetime MPG more helpful. I don't need second to second data, the green ball is good enough. But that's me.

 

[Occult Scientist]

Instantaneous MPG is pointless and a total waste of time and effort.
In a truck application it might have some value but not in a fuel efficient vehicle.

 

[Fred_B]

The closest thing to instantaneous mileage is to look at the A/B trip odometers. You can reset them to zero by holding the button in, then they start to calculate average mpg. I like to do this when I am driving on the freeway and see if I am really getting 40mpg as advertised. Usually I get slightly better. I had it showing 50mpg one time.

 

[Desert Volt]

The volt has the equivelant of instantanious miles/KWh on the drivers screen. It shows how many KW you are drawing at any moment. The problem with converting this to miles/KWh is as soon as you go to regen you are creating electicity and would have infanite miles/KW. It would make no sense. So GM just shows you the KW you are using at that moment. Averages do make sense.

As for MPG that would make no sense either in a volt since you have no control over how fast the ICE is runnning. Any MPG calculation in the Volt would jump all over the place and have little relevancy to how efficient you were beign at that moment. Again, and average does make sense.

 

[Paulacton84]

I..., but is there any place the instantaneous MPG and Miles/KW (or some similar unit) displayed?
....

The others have answered this all pretty thoroughly, I will rephrase: at a complete stop, the vehicle may be using as much as 9 kw briefly running heat and defrosters and lights and wipers and the AC. any measurement of this would be meaningless: you would see 0.01 mpkwh or some such display. the flip side is that several times a minute in most local driving conditions, the volt is generating power back to the battery, the display has to go to some equally meaningless number like 1000+ mpkwh or -3.7 kwh/mi.... So those displays, which are equally misleading in gasoline cars, were never very meaningful, they were a marketing gimmick... now, do you still want one? there is a way that you can do this yourself with something called "torque"...

 

[flyingron]

You're going to have to explain your last sarcastic comment to your overriding derogatory post. I find the MPG readout in my truck neither meaningless nor a gimmick. Sure with a calculator I can take the instantaneous energy consumption and divide it into my speed, but why should I do such when there's a computer in the dash doing little else?

 

[scottf200]

I get this in my 2011 Volt via a ScanGauge connected to the OBD II. Was on a long roadtrip last weekend and it is pretty interesting to see the MPGs change as the Volt plays (revs) with it's buffer when you do minor things like go up a small hill. In fact, I wish if you just left it in MtnMode even on roadtrips it would just utilize that buffer instead of reving. I tried it in the past and the dang thing still revs up high. I know some use MtnMode so they have EV miles at their destination. Makes no diff to me about that. I just wanted a smoother trip.

 

[VoltGuy2014]

Nice Scottf200, we can meet up when we both got out Tesla Model X!

 

[RobbertPatrison]

real-time miles/kWh is pretty useful IMHO

Its pretty cool and useful to see the Volt's electric efficiency real-time as miles/kWh. Its a pity that GM decided not to include this, as it gives good feedback on instantaneous diving style and helps predict the miles on a charge.

I can see that I'm doing good if I hit over 4 miles/kWh, and I know my driving style sucks if the efficiency sinks below 3 miles/kWh. Switching on the heater immediately results in a penalty. A lower efficiency could also mean that the Volt is climbing a hill.

The marketing geniuses at GM decided not to include the real-time miles/kWh on the display, which poses a challenge. Last year I got a dashdaq that taps the Volt's brain via the CAN bus several times per second. I programmed it to divide the EV miles and battery drain over the past 5 minutes and display that as miles/kWh real-time (details are here). I made the gauge turn red at poor efficiency (< 3 miles/kWh) and green at good efficiency (>4 miles/kWh).

As was noted in previous posts, instantaneous miles/kWh is a very noisy signal and not much different that the ball. After a little experimenting, I found that taking the average efficiency over the past 5 minutes is perfect as it smoothes out the typical accelerate/brake bumps in city driving.

Ever being the geek, I could not resist to plot other real-time data that can be harvested from the Volt's brain:

Since I'm a metric guy the efficiency is in km/kWh at the right top. The highway efficiency is 5.786km/kWh = 3.6miles/kWh or about 38 miles on a charge. The heater was running at 2.5kW (middle). It seems that the DashDaq monitor has been discontinued in the mean time. There are several smartphone apps that can do this job as well.

 

[petefoss]

I may have missed it, but is there any place the instantaneous MPG and Miles/KW (or some similar unit) displayed?
Seems with all the whiz bang displays it ought to have it. My last two GM trucks had it. All I can find is an average MPG and a total KW used as well as the instantaneous KW in/out.

You don't see it on the rest of our vehicles anymore either.

 

[sinnombre]

I've had this feature on a few cars . It really isn't useful imho.

Using sample sizes of about 0.1 miles , the same thing can be done by resetting the trip-meter .

Last week , running on the ICE I hit 61 mpg on a 31 mile stretch , and as low as 28mpg .

At times , when the engine was cold , it was as low as 28-32 mpg , then it hit 40-43 mpg @ 8-10 miles . It peaked at 62mpg at the 31 mile mark and finished at 47.6mpg at the end of 56 miles .

I thought for sure , I was going to beat my 48.8 mpg best .

 

[rmay635703]

I've had this feature on a few cars . It really isn't useful imho.

I thought for sure , I was going to beat my 48.8 mpg best .

Instantaneous info is very usefull if you know how to use it.

I use it to keep my foot rock steady and to DWL through hills, very hard not to waste energy with excessive acceleration on hills if you do not have this feedback.

My cobalt using such feedback gained 14mpg over stock, without the feedback I would have no idea that SMALL CHANGES make a huge difference in final economy.

Death by a million cuts as it were or sucess by avoiding them.

 

[Mister Dave]

Death by a million cuts as it were or sucess by avoiding them.

Up since I last heard. Used to be a thousand.

I think I'll make like a tree and get outta here......

 

[john.h.mcneely]

The instantaneous MPG is kinda pointless. Tesla doesn't have it either. Prius doesn't give out instantaneous either. But, I know some gas cars like the Honda Pilot, Toyota Highlander shows instantaneous.

Sure for that one second my MPG got 100 mpg going down a hill in the pilot. How will that benefit?

I'll tell you how I would use it. Although I won't make long highway trips in it often, once I acquire a 2019 Volt Premier this coming Summer, I am interested in plotting on a graph, the gas-mileage efficiency curve, for trips, to give me an idea of the impact of speed on gas mileage. Within reason, that might help me decide how fast to drive the car; other factors aside. In many cars the rate of change of this curve is not a constant as you add speed. We know the effect of drag alone is not a constant, but there are other factors. But the curve often has an elbow; a point at which additional speed has a more dramatic and negative effect on fuel economy. So what I would do with instantaneous MPG, on straight and level, wide-open highway, is to increment speed by one mile per hour and note the impact on instantaneous MPG after it settles down. I'd start at 55 or 60 and go up to 70-75. The instantaneous MPG with each increment in speed would give me my data points to form a line graph.

 

[dannyV]

i've always liked instant mpg. maybe i'll install the toque app again and see if i can get it to come up for the volt