Posted on 05/14/2007 11:59:24 AM PDT by antiRepublicrat
Wired was hired, got tired, was fired.
I don’t know, the Toyota numbers dropped by the same percentage as the pontiac numbers, and less than the Hummer numbers (as a percentage).
The next Prius numbers match what I get in real-world driving. I’m currently sitting at 460 miles driven on my last tank of gas, and expect to put about 10 gallons into the car.
I get 28/32 in my 1998 Camry, what’s up with THESE numbers?
Yep, but the amount of smug from Hybrid drivers is still the same.
Well yeah. It is scary driving by a car you know could burst into flames at any second.
Even the column heading is screwed-up. Is it backwards?
Toyota Prius: 60 City? 51 Highway ?
The inertial recovery (braking system) actually works more efficiently in stop and go traffic.
No. Hybrids get better mileage in the city because they run mostly on electric below 35 mph - at least the Ford Escape Hybrid does. On the road the hybrid uses gasoline only.
My 2002 Camry XLE 4-cylinder has averaged 30.5 mpg over 90,000 miles, almost entirely freeway commuter milage.
Wind resistance increases by the square of the speed of the vehicle — it’s 4 times worse at 60 mph than at 30 mph.
Stop and go city driving uses up energy to accelerate the vehicle’s mass. Hybrid vehicles recover part of that energy when braking — therefore, they can get better mileage in the city than on the highway.
It’s probably a mix. My freeway commute is fairly easy. Rush hour has gotten bad over the past ten years but I have flex time so I can stagger my hours so as to just miss rush hour both ways.
A fair amount of my Camry’s milage has also been 250-400 mile roundtrip mostly cruise-control freeway drives to the coast, where my children have been in college, or on vacations.
Cruise-control at freeway speeds does a lot to increase milage, especially if you stay below the speed where milage drops off sharply for a given vehicle (@ 73 mph for my Camry, but @ 67 mph for my Ford Freestyle).
I’ve been lucky that more than half my total Camry milage, perhaps as much as 2/3, has been on freeways with the cruise-control on. That has pushed my average mpg up close to the theoretical maximum.
Sorry, couldn’t find the story elsewhere.
Maybe average mileage across the line.
That’s interesting you figured out where the most bang for the buck is on speed/mileage. As I said in a previous post the Civic will get 40 mpg when my wife is going along at 70, maybe 75, but it drops to 36-37 when I hover around 80. I have an Accord that was struggling to get 25 city but now it has limbered up and can get about 28. Highway mileage is similar to your Camry.
Since nobody gets EPA numbers, I doubt the lawsuits will be productive. Some people get really bad numbers, much worse than EPA, usually because of how they drive.
The web site you referenced was funny. Not the article, I had heard of that and am waiting to see what comes of it. The Prius drive train is patented, but it amazes me that nobody did anything like it before. I think though what will win the day for Toyota is that they are using a triple-moter system, not a dual-motor system, and their patent may therefore be unique enough to survive the challenge.
I’m surprised though they didn’t just pay the guy off. They are competing in the same field, after all.
What was funny was reading other owner reports of “failure modes”. For example, the “stall” is a known condition, but they had a story where the guy didn’t turn off his car or put it in park, because “he couldn’t make it work”. So when they finished towing the car, and unhooked it, it rolled into the tow truck.
Another guy insisted that he couldn’t stop the car when it got stuck in runaway acceleration. But the truth is the toyota engines aren’t that powerful, and the brakes can easily stop the car even if you are giving it full gas. Heck, that’s true of just about every car, just push the brakes down and floor the car.
Anyway, back to mileage. The problem with the Prius is it’s still a mid-size weight car, and it’s expected efficiency is about the same as any other car of the same weight, for obvious reasons.
But the Prius RAISES that efficiency through several clever means, mostly involving two principles — first, that gas engines have a widely varying efficiency, and by restricting the engine to a narrow operating range you can keep it in it’s max efficiency range.
NOTE that, if a drive knew how to do that himself, he could get as good a gas mileage as the Prius in ANY car with the same size engine. It would require long acceleraton times though. The Prius uses the electric motor/battery to add extra power when needed so the engine can run at better efficiency, and then continues to run the engine at higher efficiency to charge the battery back up for the next time — meaning most all of the operation is at the engine’s highest efficiency. BUT, it’s still a gasoline engine.
The SECOND major source of gain is turning off the engine when it isn’t needed. But that only helps if your drive includes a lot of stopping. Most people don’t, and if they do, they weren’t getting good mileage in their other cars either. EPA does stop/go for city, and that helped the Prius efficiency.
The problem is, if you drive very aggressively, you can force the Prius into circumventing both of these features. First, you can ride the brake too lightly at stops, which makes the car try to inch forward, using up electricity. Second, if you accelerate quickly and decellerate quickly you won’t get charged much and you will be forced to operate the engine outside of efficient ranges.
this will effect efficiency in ANY car, but like I said, if you do this Prius won’t be any better than any other car with the same engine. So driving agressively HURTS a Prius mileage MORE than it would hurt a regular car mileage.
But it still does better than the regular car would in the same circumstance. BTW, I’ve found that I can drive home at 30 mpg, or 50 mpg, simply by changing in small ways my driving style, but still going the same overall speed. That’s a big difference, and if you never pay attention you can be very dissappointed in your mileage.
I could get over 50mpg easily on highway, except I drive very fast on the highway so I only get around 46 or so (70+ mph all the time). I’ve done some trips at 60/65 mph (speed limit) and gotten well over 50mpg.
Actually, they also do better in city because they shut down the engine whenever they are stopped. Slower is almost always is more efficient, but for regular cars the better efficiency is lost because the engine runs when it isn’t needed. The hybrids shut the engine off, saving tons of energy (unless you drive with a heavy foot).
Still, nobody was getting 60 in the city. I find my city/highway are about the same.
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