A friend of mine is claiming she is getting aproximately 80 miles too the gallon using her older model Toyota Prius. This seems complete bullshit too me, as she isn’t using the after market plug in adaption, nor is she using after market upgraded batteries (she has all original equipment). I was wondering…does anyone have a good mileage estimate for the older Prius models? What kind of gas mileage could one expect too get from a standard Prius?
Also, does anyone have a good estimate on what one COULD get with all the after market goodies (like the plug in adaption and better batteries and such)? I’m thinking of buying an older Prius (despite my friends wild claims I think they are kind of cool too own and they DO get pretty good mileage…if not 80 miles to the gallon) and then tinkering with it too see how far I can go. Another friend of mine told me about some very light weight tires that can also get a boost of a few percentage points in gas mileage.
I don’t have direct info to answer your question, but I do remember hearing something about a “mileage challenge” over on the Prius Chat forum with very high mileage figures.
The Prius has an in-cab milage display. It is possible that A)She is cherry picking the peak readings or B)The calibration of that display is off for one of many possible reasons. One of those reasons might be that the distance sensor is malfunctioning, in which case calculations based on odometer readings would confirm the exagerated fuel economy.
I’m betting that’s it. When you’re “cruising” with little pressure on the gas pedal, you get some pretty high mpg figures on the dash computer even in ordinary cars.
I often see the current MPG reading at 99 MPG (as high as the scale goes) but the average for a whole tank of fuel is usually in the 47 MPG range. This is for a 2004 model.
There are some guys who got over 100 MPG by doing something called “pulse and glide”. The idea is to get the car up to around 40-45 mph, then let off the gas, but keep enough pressure on the pedal so that it won’t try to recharge the batteries through the regenerative braking. This optimizes the coasting. However, they did this just back and forth on a very flat stretch of highway, under controlled conditions. There are also drivers who try various “hypermiling” strategies. (Cites below). So, even without the plug-in gizmo and other retrofits, you can do quite well. In real-world driving, though, I’m skeptical of an 80 MPG average . Maybe she has absolutely perfect conditions, but 80 MPG sounds hard to keep up in normal driving. I was tickled when I averaged 50 MPG over 30 K miles in my 2005 model.
If your daily driving is short, and you drive it VERY gently, you won’t wake up the gasoline engine very often. You have to adjust your sensibilities, too. Getting up to the speed limit quickly and pleasing the scowling motorists behind you are not important. You’ll need those adjustments, if you want big increases in your MPG. If you have a retrofit plug-in system, you could go for a long time without using the gas engine at all.
This is partly a fallacy. If your car runs most of its miles on energy from the plug in the wall, you aren’t using much gasoline, but you are using coal instead.
Well, that depends on where your electricity comes from. Here in Ontario, plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles, when running on electrics and charged from the wall, are 50% nuclear-powered.
I did not mean to disparage the electrical power plants, coal-powered or otherwise. I tried (and perhaps failed) to remind folks that a plug-in hybrid does not run on magic. Getting off the gasoline tit is a good thing, but plugging a car in at night will still cost you money. You’ve traded your little piece of the petroleum system for a little piece of the coal and/or nuclear system, and your wallet drains to a different place.
Will a plug-in hybrid use more electricity than a water heater, or less? It may be too early to tell. When somebody makes batteries good enough to make cars like the General Motors Volt practical, the scales with move.
I’m not hostile about this thing, and I don’t want to start a fight. I just want us to be realistic. Just…think about it.
I’m not so sure about some of those numbers. I know that some of our engineers had a presentation showing that our PZEV cars had a lower impact on the environment than an electric car would assuming a coal fired generating plant.
I also know that the California resources board tested some of our PZEV cars and found that when driving on the road, under some conditions, that the air behind the car was cleaner than the air coming into the car. In particular ground level ozone, and hydrocarbons registered negative numbers.
Maybe we can get Una the queen of coal to stop by and check the numbers in your link.
But smog’s dropped off the map… it’s all about the CO2 these days, which isn’t measured for PZEV status. You’d be surprised (not you, Rick, people in general) some of the cars that are PZEF, run of the mill things like the Focus and Escape. I used to build part of the fuel system for these, and there were great efforts made to keep them PZEF compliant. I’ve probably seen the same presentations as Rick – if not for the CO2 displacing your oxygen, you could suck on the exhaust pipe all day long (well, at risk of burnt lips, I suppose).
In short, I’m just pointing out the CO2 cost isn’t reduced; I don’t know the CO2 cost of a coal-fired plant.
