My 2019 Insight thread

Traded from a gen2 Prius to a Gen3 Honda Insight Touring, the top trim. I'll keep a thread going to track my experiences with it.

The car is essentially a Civic Hybrid, as it is built on the same platform. My vehicle sat on a dealer lot for nearly a year before I purchased it. Not sure how this will affect longevity of the battery, but I guess we will see. The hybrid strategy differs slightly from the Prius, in that wheels run purely off of electric power below highway speeds. The engine turns on and off to power a generator and/or charge the battery depending on soc or throttle demand. At highway speeds, the transmission directly connects to the engine to power the wheels, but can still disconnect and run off of battery power - I've cruised along at 70mph on electric power. It's quiet, it feels luxurious, it has apple carplay, the stereo reads .flac files, the trunk is huge, and it looks fantastic.

Now for some weird bits. Since the engine and wheels aren't directly linked at lower speeds, it can feel quite odd to drive at times. The engine will rev hard occasionally to power the car up a hill (it hates hills), despite relatively low throttle. Think accelerating in your Prius with 2 battery bars remaining. It also has a wave pattern with regard to mileage, where the mpg is lower while the engine runs, and higher when it turns off and goes battery powered. This is especially evident on the highway, and mpg will suffer greatly when exceeding 70mph. I think I prefer Toyota's hybrid system where the mpg graph is smoother, but time will tell.

I'm curious to know what the Insight's modes of operation are, vs the Prius (The Five Stages of Prius Hybrid Operation | PriusChat). Sometimes the engine fires up immediately on startup, sometimes it lets me drive it around on pure battery power for a minute or so. The knowledgebase for the car is rather lean, since it's a new model, but a dedicated forum does exist. It's going in for a tint job (3M Crystalline) soon, and future plans include some lightweight wheels. The 17" Touring wheels were reported on the forums to weigh an absurdly tubby 27lbs each, so cutting that down should improve mileage. So far so good with the first 700 miles, averaging at around 48mpg.

 

This is what I was thinking too. I can also manually make it go into "EV" mode by lifting my foot off the gas, same as the Prius.

 

Finished the first tank of gas with the car completely under our ownership - 51mpg or so. This included my wife's extremely short trips to work with low mpg, and my longer 30min commute, as well as about 2 hours of highway driving. The reported mpg was around 49 on the display, but at the pump it calculated out to 51. Following an 18-wheeler on the highway going about 60-65mph got me about 56mpg on my return trip, better than I ever got with my gen2 Prius. I've seen as high as 60mpg in suburban driving, on a 15-20 minute trip, rolling hills, mostly downhill I'm guessing. Pretty impressive.

 

Yeah I really like that actually. Both my Prius and Cayman report higher than what I calculated at the pump.

 

A big con I've noticed is build quality - this car has more godawful gaps and misaligned panels than any other vehicle I've owned. I certainly hope it doesn't extend into the mechanical parts of the car, but I guess we will see. I don't recall my '98 Integra having gaps like this.

This guy shows off some similar issues I'm having with mine:

 

Yeah it's a first year model. Mine is a pretty low VIN too.