Honda Insight: No Smooth Operator

Oh I am duly impressed with the car's value proposition, I approve of its packaging, I'm fine with its riff on the iconic Prius's profile, and I'm truly smitten by the speedometer digits which appear to hover in space above a background that changes colors like an eco-mood ring. But the way it transitions from "Auto Stop" to engine-on, to pulling away from a stop is borderline non-commercial -- at least in our test car. The transition from regenerative to friction braking was better but also noticeable.

The jerks, fits and starts that happen when stepping off from a stop would have me checking for a stuck accelerator pump, a clogged fuel filter, a finicky choke, or suggest lubing my throttle linkage if one of my 1960s era-carbureted cars behaved the same way. And switching out of ECON mode didn't seem to smooth things out much. The modest 10-mph or so winds that blew early-springtime weather through Detroit this weekend seemed to shove the little ovoid Honda around more than necessary too, perhaps due to the tall, skinny, low-rolling-resistance tires.

At least the fuel economy appeared to be impressive. For the first ten or fifteen miles I drove it, the indicated range kept increasing (my colleague Motor City Blogman admitted to driving it "normally," not in hypermiler mode). Indeed, on my last 12-mile drive into the office the bar-graph history chart indicated over 60 mpg, achieved by driving on mostly deserted neighborhood roads, accelerating gently with nobody behind me to 30 mph, and never letting the speedo background go blue. But then, to my immense disappointment, the little display that grades your performance when you power off the ignition still indicated an eco grade of just one leaf pair (two and three pairs are apparently better). Presumably that display is not grading the most recent trip (180 mpg seems highly unlikely), but rather some longer interval. Clearly I have to interest Mr. Lassa in hypermiling if I want a decent "grade" on the next Insight that rolls through here...