Hi coppercuckoo;
Thank you for sharing your experience on this Civic Hybrid. I notice that there is very limited info from my own country, for the 9th Gen Civic, even rarer for the hybrid per se.
Being newbie on this Honda civic hybrid, I'd like to share some of my observation.
1. If I try to "baby-sit" this hybrid to achieve a "better" mpg reading, it seems quite trying.
2. However, when I treat it like a normal car & just drive it like a non-hybrid (like my previous 8th Gen Civic 1.8), I notice a better mpg just come naturally. It seems that the "system" just take care of the portion on "fuel-efficiency" (with the ECON selected ON all this while). I'm getting about 43mpg on average, and this mpg is still improving slowly by the days.
This bring me to an article that I'd read previously, saying Honda design this hybrid as "...Civic first, hybrid second...".
Anyway, I'm still in the "run-in" phase, just logging the 1st 1,000km. Will see how it goes after this servicing.
But, over-all, I'm happy, as the hybrid "range" has allowed my petrol/gas fill-up to "stretch" to once every 2-weeks, instead of previous weekly fill-up, covering the same distance & routine, as that compare with using my previous ride.
In fact, this allows me to run addition trips on the same tank of petrol/gas, which I did not do so on my previous ride, without the worry of having to fill-up the petrol/gas in mid-week. Amazing!