A couple we know just bought a new Prius. On a 200 mile round trip, they claim they got 77 mpg highway. This trip took them from 9500’ elevation down to 9000 feet, then over an 11000 foot pass and then down to 5000 feet. Reverse the ‘hills’ to get home This was the mileage from the computer readout.
I’m a little :dubious: Under normal driving conditions, at speeds of say 65 mph, is that possible?
I suspect they reset the computer at the top of the 11000’ pass and more or less coasted home.
That doesn’t sound that outrageous to me. Highway journeys at constant speed are a very good way to get high mileage. They may have been travelling at, say, 55mph, which would help as well.
I own one, and I’m slightly skeptical. If I fill up my tank and reset the mileage calculator, and start driving downhill, I can get awesome (like up to 99mpg) mileage. But the minute I go uphill it starts to degrade.
It sounds like they did a lot of downhill, but I would think the uphill would have counterbalanced that. I could see something like 55 mpg, but I guess it depends on how much of the trip was downhill vs uphill.
And obviously at the same gradients too - which might otherwise have made a difference.
What I mean is that if you’re driving along a road that consists of sawtooth hills, long and shallow on one side and short and steep on the other, it may well be the case that greater fuel economy is achievable in one direction than the other, with no violation of physical laws, just because the vehicle’s efficiency may not enjoy a linear relationship with the gradient you drive it up/down.
But if - as you say - it was a there-and-back using the same roads, then we can’t appeal to such advantages.
Or perhaps this is just an ecoconscious version of what my friend calls the “redneck time warp,” wherein a driver insists he can make any particular car trip in half the time it actually takes normal mortals.
I’m a Prius partisan, but that sounds high to me. The best I ever got on the highway was about 58mpg over 400 miles between Cincinnati and St. Louis on I-64.
The onboard calculator is not very accurate – you really have to do the math yourself if you want to know your mileage. But even when you do the math, there is the caveat that sometimes the pump cuts off early when you’re filling the tank. Once I was amazed at my 80 mpg for a tank, only to follow it with 30mpg because I hadn’t filled the tank all the way the last time before the pump cut out. So, my guess is that they’ve either put too much trust in the onboard display or made a mistake somewhere.
As I thought. I suspect that for any car going the same route to and from the same destination using the same roads any incline (severe ones like the rockies) are going to give you worse MPG. Or perhaps the same as on a level road.
I don’t know these folks that well. But I do know the road they where on. I can’t imagine slipstreaming a semi on I-70 in the Rockies (and I’m completely against that tactic. It’s dangerous in Kansas, not something you want to do on mountain roads).
This, is what I think it is. But the couple in question are far, far from ‘rednecks’. Japanese (that’s about as far from a redneck as you can get), live in a million dollar house (at least).
Love them I do. Very nice folks. But it aggravates me that the Wife told my Wife that they are getting 77mpg dropping down to Denver AND back. I suspect that is double of what it really gets.
Our local Traffic writer for the Mercury News went on a quest to get 60MPG, which is the high goal, and only got it after quite a bit of training and special driving.
No I’m not. They bought the car through ‘Cost Co’ I’m still trying to wrap my mind around that. Perhaps it is set at KM per gallon and not Miles. That does make a bit of sense. I can’t imagine that a ‘out of the box’ Prius would get 77mpg in moutain highway driving.
If it did, well … There is some new law of physics that Toyota is holding back on.
There’s some extereme milage people who have gotten that, but on a flat racetrack. That seems unlikely for a round trip (unless there was a VERY stong wind which reversed direction)
Km per gallon would be a strange setting. I wouldn’t think they would mix metric and imperial like that. Here in Canada, the metric way to calculate mileage is litres per 100 kilometers. My Altima get about 9.2 l/100k, so I could see 7.7 being reasonable for a Prius. Could that be it?
Perhaps. And I also doubt that it was set to km instead of miles. But ya never know. (they bought it through Cost Co, I have no idea how that works, or how the car is set up)
I suspect that they will find out soon enough that they are getting about 42 mpg with mountain driving. Which is great.
If they are getting 77mpg between 5 and 9000 feet, well Ill have to eat my hat. It’s odd. They are very smart folks. They each have their own business (computers/web sites/programming). Perhaps they know nothing about cars. The claim of 77mpg was made to my Wife while I was not there.
>Not in Prius. They get their best milage in urban, stop-and-go traffic, as the regenerative braking constantly recharges the batteries.
I don’t think this is right. They might enjoy the best mileage advantage relative to other cars in such traffic, because the regeneration would recover some of what, for the other cars, would be a complete kinetic energy loss. But, it can’t recover more than 100% of this energy. So, stop-and-go might reduce the Prius mileage a little and the ordinary car mileage a lot, but it won’t help anybody.
Now, maintaining a slow average speed - that will help most vehicles, quite a bit. There was an article in the local paper about a fellow who’s made sort of a hobby out of learning how to drive to minimize fuel consumption, and he claims to average about 50 mpg in a pretty standard Toyota sedan (don’t remember which one, but not a hybrid). I think he tries to keep his speed below 35 mph. If he’s going to that much trouble, he deserves to get great mileage.