Live from Boise

After dropping off Jeanne and Marcel. ride along in the Escalade as it motors around on battery power.

The first display is the graphical display of the power mode. In this clip, it is showing the drivetrain powered completely by battery power (blue). When the engine starts up, its power will show in orange, with the battery power rolling over to green for Hybrid power mode. When the Hybrid mode kicks off, such as increased acceleration, low battery juice, or the transmission or engine temperature is too low, the display shows complete orange for engine power only.

Moving to the drivers dashboard console, on the left is the RPM gauge sitting at the Auto Start position. In this mode, the engine is off, but sits at Auto Start to indicate to you it will start on demand.

I ran on battery power in the subdivision, but when I pulled out onto the main road, the engine kicked on and I ran in Hybrid power to Eagle road. Once on Eagle, I accelerated more quickly and ran on Engine power to about 50mph. Once there, it slid into Hybrid mode as I held the pedal just barely on to keep the speed constant. When I let off the pedal to turn into Madison Park, the engine shut down and I was back on battery power, pulling into the driveway and spending five minutes exploring more buttons and menus.

I had a stack of receipts hanging around for months, and finally got around to updating my fuel tracking spreadsheet for the Tahoe. Rather interesting to watch the price of fuel plummet in 2H ’08. The last two tanks in the Tahoe have an Albertson’s discount applied due to our preferred card. Oddly enough, diesel was still hovering around $2.80 in mid December, almost double the cost of regulary unleaded, but has come down to the $2.20 range lately.

I dug back through the various records I have kept, and seems like 1999 was the cheapest year on record, although I always put premium in my ’87 Firebird, so it is about 20-30 cents higher than regular: