Good points! I tend to get under the car only when changing oil. I have 'drive up' ramps and it has been 'exciting' to raise the car. But Doug showed me his shop jack for changing a tire and I may switch to using a jack and jack stands. However, Doug discovered the wheels on the jack may need to be removed to handle a flat tire.

With a flat tire, the car is very low to the ground. A shop jack with roll-around wheels is still too high to fit under the side jack point. But it looks like taking the front wheels off of the jack would give the extra clearance needed. In Doug's case, the OEM jack got it high enough to use the hydraulic, shop jack.

Bob Wilson

 

I embarassed to admit I'm still struggling to understand this display. I get the bottom line--the more green the better, and the more little cars, the better. But what does the time line really mean? Are those segments of driving time, so that you end up a map of sorts of the energy you've earned (or used) in recurring 30 minutes segments, or are they units of battery time earned?

 

Hi,
I'll share what little I've learned but I'll be the first to say I still have questions about the MDF display. This is what I understand:

• right bar - represents the 'instantaneous' (1-2 seconds) miles per gallon.
• six history bars - using some unknown algorithm, some collection of the instantaneous bars, accumulated over a 5 minute interval, are inserted on the right and all bars shift to the left. The six bars cover 30 minutes of 'bar' MPG, of some unknown source.
• "99.9MPG" - appears to be a running average bounded only by hitting "Reset". I'm not sure but I think "Reset" puts a zero MPG entry in the running average but I'm not sure.

This display is important because it shows a critical data point on the MPG vs MPH chart:


I've posted another graph where I used a 'trick' to fool the MFD display. I found that if your speed is less than 6 mph, the 2001-2003 MFD does NOT update the instantaneous display. Also, it is possible to reach 6 mph on battery only.

What I did was fully charge the battery and come to a stop. Within 5 minutes, the instantaneous display bar shifted to the six history bars. I gently used the battery to reach 6 mph for a 100 MPG instantaneous display bar and then stopped for 5 minutes. The solid bar would shift in the history bar graphs and I repeated this until I had a full display of 100 MPG bars.

Bob Wilson