Dear Honda

[Mike Dabrowski 2000]

Dear Honda
I am writing an instalation manual for MIMA_C, so that 20 to 1000 Insight owners can hack into the wiring harness of their Insight cars.
Each of us loves the car and marvel at the beauty of the engineering, and hope to keep it forever. Yet we are willing to risk possibily loosing our warrant. Why?
Because we have realized our dream, that there should be a way for the operator to charge or use the electric drive, to adjust the cars performance and efficiency by changing the ratio of electric to gas power, at will. Preliminary results are clearly showing 5-20% MPG improvement with 100 MPG being achieved on normal commutes both highway and country road.
Now the question is will you help us by giving us a way to purchace the connectors we need to do the modification in a safe and removable way, so everyone with an Insight can reap the MPG benifit.
What do you say, be brave, this could be a great marketing move on your part.

[tubesguy]

Mike -

I like the letter. The lack of "plug and play" is the one thing that may prevent me from going MIMA now that I've finally found an Insight.

Have you tried to publicize this in other ways? I'm thinking of "Car and Driver" especially. They always have a kind of tuner section in the back of the mag, where they do stories on 800-hp Vipers and Honda-powered Minis. This would be a natural, it would seem.

It's certainly more newsworthy than getting 100 mpg in a Prius by driving between 33 and 41 mph. I mean (no offense intended to the guys who did it) that's a mere parlor trick, and your mod is a real-world design for hypermileage. - Pat

[james]

I wish they'd think about going even further, and opening up their source code for the controllers. Lots of things that could be done beyond MIMA, if we didn't need someone as knowlegeable as Mike to reverse-engineer the system.

Things like changing the battery usage (now that my warranty's almost expired) from 20-80% of capacity to 10-90%, making a higher-capacity pack from used Prius cells, and grid-charging would be a lot easier if we had source code and docs. And if our experiments work, Honda can put them in its next generation.

[Jackmpg]

Hi All,
Last winter I did the "Detroit" publishing route, including Car & Driver, for the turbo. Only hybrids then came from Japan, so soon as I said hybrid, they ran for the hills. Maybe it's different now, don't know. Jack