Getting Flipped Off Is A Badge of Honor

Don't take it personally. There are a LOT of threads that go this way in this community. Doesn't mean we don't all still get along well.

BTW - if your feeling are hurt easily, stay away from the Tesla board.

 

Just don't be surprised if most drivers attribute like names to you and express additional sign language to your new found "hypermiling skills"...when applied in like situations. Your specific math regarding the miniscule time lost...also lost applies to minicule gas saved. We all like driving a vehicle that rarely breaks and gets great mpg...but we have to share the road. You will find the friendly advise given in this thread was learned first hand.

 

It's not funny at all.

In the USA we get to decide what's right -- the whole community. It's a society where we have freedom, but that freedom is tempered by what the community decides is right and wrong. That's part of living in society.

So you can dismiss people's reactions as "victim shaming" if you want. Or you figure out that maybe your conduct wasn't exactly stellar. At least that's what the community is telling you.

OTOH, my kids often don't listen either!

 

You reap what you sow. Good luck.

 

hmph...

This guy starts a thread, and spends 3 pages trying to explain away and/or justify his actions. Would love to hear the "bird flipper's" side of this story. I'm guessing we'd get a significantly different one.

 

Ditto. Reading this thread might lead one to believe that "hypermilling" was a form of OCD. You don't see road-rage cases flipping off farm tractors, but then again, they're excused - not to mention that most tractors drivers have the decency and common sense to pull over when they can.

 

Anything can be a form of OCD, if you're OCD enough...

I do wish Toyota had done two changes to these cars for hypermilers.

1. Embrace the seat-mile per gallon. The car has occupancy sensors under the seats, so it knows how many butts are in the car. The very best scores would go to the most social drivers bringing their friends & family around.

2. Enable an easy data dump out of the car, and maybe put less emphasis on the realtime feedback. The RT stuff is useful for learning greener pedalwork, but it can become a distraction of its own. Offline access to the consumption data might fix this.

 

Most of us got over the video game in very short order. Now if we could get people to stop watching their other screen while driving...

 

I wonder sometimes, what do the ardent tailgaters do, at 3 am, when there's no one to keep them in check. Rev up to the speed of light? Go with the flow? I mean: they're the flow, there's nobody else on the road. Or maybe they settle down, start going more or less the limit. Not that they need to, but hey, there could be a cop sitting on a side street, you know...

I think they've got a case of idee fixe: as soon as there's someone in front of them, something happens in their brain. It's kinda like a dog on a leash, gets more aggressive. Let them all off-leash, they all calm down, well a bit, start to respect boundaries.

 

Hybrid Assistant does this. Make a run, generate a report with Hybrid reporter and you will see every detail of your drive, including throttle position, glide evaluation, graphs, charts, statistics. Then you can hypermile in your pajamas in front of the computer and not on the road blocking traffic.

This math isn't hard to do in your head. "I'm getting 60 mpg indicated, and there are three of us in the car..."

 

going with the flow is a misnomer. if you study highway traffic, cars travel in packs. there is a reason for this, and it goes into the human condition.
some are leaders and some are followers. the leaders don't care about getting a ticket, (or they have radar) and the followers feel safe in a group, (cops can't pull over a whole group of cars mentality)

but the truth is, there is no 'flow'. there's just speeders, lawful drivers and slow pokes.

 

I notice this too...especial on extended freeway drives. I tend to set my cruise control to a few MPH over the speed limit and then let the 'packs' pass me. It has been a great strategy...and a lot less stressful overall.

 

That's good, didn't know about it. Part of the difficulty is that the car is trying to incentivize a certain behavior, yet that has no input sensitivity to the social aspect of driving i.e., not being a rolling roadblock.

True enough. My line of reasoning here is that if the best scores went to more social drivers, there might be less incentive for the solo driver to try hypermiling. They'd be getting shoved off the leaderboard by mom's taxi every time. That could be beneficial in a few ways- more people learn about the Prius, and the person doing the driving is more socially engaged during the driving. My theory is that driving while socially engaged (even just a little) with your passengers is going to make the driver a little more sensitive to other drivers. Result: better driving behavior, better reputation for "Prius drivers." Also, more witnesses for when the guy in the civic really is just a horrible jerk.

 

I don't think the car is trying to incentivize anything. It's just a car. It's the people driving it who are doing the incentivizing / rationalizing and driving with no regard for others on the road while they play with their new toy.

 

Right, but do you get it that by changing the realtime data displayed within the car, there might not be the right elements to allow the driver to do that incentivizing and rationalizing? I'll agree that antisocial drivers will find ways to be antisocial driving mule carts or supertankers.

 

No. Once you figure out how to drive this car efficiently and calibrate your throttle foot, there isn't much more to do. One display on the dash is all you need to look at, and even then occasionally glance at it.

I've gone down the route of running a scan gage in my previous car, along with various apps (Torque, etc.). They were cute and fun for a bit, but once I figured out how the car responded to throttle inputs, I didn't need to look at them anymore. You get the feel for the car, and as long as the feel is the same as when you were looking at all the fancy gages, the car is driving the same.

I've stared at the Hybrid Assistant app on my Prime, and after about 2 days I put it away and just leave it running in the background to record the trip data for later reference.

Regardless of what displays Toyota might provide, that doesn't fix the driver problem. One good addition might be a rear-facing camera and/or radar, and a big warning light comes on the dash that says "speed your butt up or move over, you're impeding traffic."

 

Actually, nearly all spuertankers (ULCC or VLCCs) are driven by very courteous and professional drivers.

They have to be.

They can take several kilometers to stop and their turning radii are also measured in kilometers.
They can cost more than $50,000USD to operate...PER DAY (almost $35 a minute) and they operate in the busiest and most congested shipping lanes in the world.
Oh yeah, and if they are involved in a collision, then they (we all) might suffer from consequences more serious than a traffic ticket and increased insurance premiums....
Despite operating costs that are always expressed in multiple dollars per minute all ship drivers and to a lesser extent airplane drivers are almost universally considerate and polite first and foremost.
It's simply more efficient to do business that way, and it's better for the planet.
Sometimes?
Simple politeness and courtesy must be truncated, as is seen sometimes in operating rooms, ERs, and in other situation where the rule is: "ACT now....deal with questions and hurt feelings, LATER." but these are situations where the stakes might be a little more important than getting a high score on your car's hypermiling game.

Like I said earlier....
"Common Sense" and "Common Courtesy" are......somewhat curiously named.

YMMV

 

After reading your post, I immediately thought of Captain Joe Hazelwood, and I thought it would be apropos to mention him or maybe post a picture of him.

I did a quick google and found this:



Almost a little too perfect...