The Prius is an amazing car and has continued to surprise us along the way. Purchased in January after losing one of our other cars in an accident we have been pleased with the comfort, quietness, smooth ride, and of course fuel economy of this well designed car. I don't think hybrids are the long term answer to the world transportation dilemma (I think it is hydrogen fuel cells), but it is a good gap-filler until something better comes along.
The Prius is a surprisingly simple design with big benefits. There is no traditional transmission, in fact the car doesn't actually have a reverse gear. Instead it has what Toyota calls the Synergy drive; a set of six gears in a planetary arrangement that is coupled to two electric motors, the gas engine, and the wheels. This single reliable unit serves as the transmission, continuously variable drive (read no gear shifting), and the transfer unit that allows the engine and electric motors to share the load. Aside from that the synergy drive will transfer power from the wheels to the motor-generators to charge the battery when ever the car is slowing down whether you apply brakes or not.
The engine of the Prius is an alternative to the standard internal combustion engine in that it is highly efficient when pushing the car along at a constant rate of speed but needs a little help from the electric motors when climbing or accelerating. The computer will shut the engine off when not needed so sitting at traffic signals is to be using no gas at all.
We now have about 18,000 miles on the Prius since January and have averaged somewhere around 48-52 mpg. We've never had a tank of gas under 45mpg and have experienced a couple of tanks around 60 mpg. On this 3,500 mile driving trip from Southern California to Canada and back we are easily averaging 50 mpg.
For this trip we did nothing special to achieve 50 mpg other than over inflating the tires to 46 psi in the front and 44 psi in the rear tires. Normal I think is 38 psi. For this we've noticed no difference in the ride and think it has resulted in about 2 mpg better performance. Otherwise we have had two adults and an adult sized 14 year old in the car for most of the trip along with our luggage including two laptop computers and a medium sized ice chest. The air conditioner has been on for 98% of the trip, windows closed, and we've used the cruise control for perhaps 90% of the driving. Our trip has been rather slow in terms of highway speeds, mostly due to the routes we have chosen. Only on the very last leg did we travel at higher speeds. Perhaps 90% of our trip has been at 55 mph or less. However the trip also has involved a lot of hills, sometimes climbing from sea level to over a mile high in Washington, Mt Rainier, and over 7,000 feet at Crater Lake.
The Prius has a clever display called the Multi Function Display shown here:
This display shows 56.2 mpg average over 199 miles since we last filled the tank. No special driving techniques, just a great car doing it's thing and doing it well. As I write this the car sits outside the hotel room with 420 miles on the tank and 55.5 mpg average showing with still 1/3 tank left. Averaging the six tanks we used so far shows 51.6 mpg overall.
Aug 11, 2008 Final gas mileage is 51mpg over 3,574 miles on this 21 day trip. The last two tanks carried us 530 miles screaming down highway 5 in the California central valley at 75mph; both tanks averaged 46.9mpg - our lowest tanks ever in the Prius. It's easy to see that speed is contrary to good mileage.
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