Unlike most of my family members I don’t have green thumbs. The garden at our family home is always well manicured, usually bursting with colour and the grass is cut inch-perfect – but no thanks to me. I have one plant, a bonsai tree that was given to me as a gift. I’ve nearly killed the poor thing on more than one occasion and only with help of a friend who knows about such things did we managed to save the little Ficus. With this in mind I did however recently take to growing an entire garden of flowers…
My current long-term test car is a Honda CR-Z, which boasts a hybrid drivetrain – an electric motor coupled with a 1,5-litre petrol engine. As part of the planet-saving initiative the CR-Z tries to expound are various drive modes and electronic coaches to help tailor ones driving style to ultimately be more fuel efficient. I’ve outlined some of the systems in an earlier blog [here]. But my favourite of these coaches takes the shape of a garden growing.
A graphic in the instrument cluster displays the stem of a plant, and the more economically you drive the more plants you are rewarded with. Continue to sip fuel at a slow rate and those stems grow to an entire garden with flowers atop each plant. Keep up the good work and eventually you’ll even be rewarded with a trophy!
It’s a nifty little game aimed at keeping you driving efficiently, conveniently avoiding speeding fines at the same time. As the Honda is sometimes driven by some of my colleagues we have taken to challenging one another to see who can grow a garden the quickest. It may be “my” car but Wilhelm Lutjeharms and Kyle Kock both seem to have very light right feet and easily tend to better my best fuel consumption figures. Both gentlemen easily dip below the 6,0L/100 km mark whereas I flirt with that figure only when I am being very cautious. Overall the average fuel consumption for the last year has hovered around 6,8 litres/100 km.
At CAR we always receive letters from frugal drivers commenting on how far they’ve driven on a single tank of fuel. With the proliferation of connected cars and tutorials such as these on the CR-Z it won’t be long before you can challenge your friends to real-time fuel consumption challenges? Who knows, maybe you can even bet a few real plants on it? Just don’t ask me to babysit them while you head off on vacation…
(A full gallery of the Honda CR-Z can be viewed here)