Need some answers from you more experienced Prius owners. Just purchased a 2011 level 4 Prius. Manual says once fuel guage starts blinking you have approx 1.5 galls of fuel remaining. I was at 615 miles when the indicator started to blink. I had been averaging 54 mpg. So I should have had approx 81 miles to empty. Simple math! When I selected miles remaining on the dash display it said 32. I normally don't allow the gas to get that low but this was a unusual set of circumstances. Upon fill up it took 11.1 gallons indicating the display was more correct than the fuel guages blinking... Any thoughts or similiar experiences?
i don't think the gen I or II had 'miles remaining" info? plus, i don't think they want you to drive it to empty.
Gen II definitely does not display any sort of distance until empty. OP, you posted in the wrong area. This isn't Prius v related. I've noticed a lot of new threads being started in this wrong area lately. Is there something about the web site's design, wording or layout that seems to cause people to post in the wrong area, mainly this one?
i understand, but what answers are you looking for. i don't think the car knows exactly how much gas it has left or exactly how far you can go. the safest bet is to fill up before it starts flashing. and this comes from someone who ran out of gas!
Hi bradysplace, The manual said the fuel gauge starts to blink with approximately 6 litres left (45 litres tank) on the tank. My distance to empty indicator (DTE) shows about 50km left when the fuel gauge started to blink, and if I exhaust that last 50km to 0km , I think that's when the last 6 litres starts to run down. This was further verified when I filled her up right after, 37 to 38 litres. I also fill all the way up until I see the fuel. Hope I've made myself clear...
Of course fill up before it starts blinking - if that is a option! Answer to what question I am looking for a answer to - people with less prius experience like myself visit forums like this to reach out to others who might better explain some idosyn's. Thanks Slide that makes sense.
You are expecting far more fuel gauge accuracy than I have ever heard available on any car. Did your previous car's fuel gauge and distance-to-empty display behave the way you want your Prius to behave? None of mine did. All gauges have some error, and fuel consumption is very highly variable, especially over the short term as cold engines warm up and cars climb steep hills. Therefore measurements and displays cannot be exactly correct very often, and some error will be the norm. If the gauging was made as accurate as possible, half the time the inevitable error would be in the wrong direction, causing fuel starvation before the gauge and DTE read Zero, and stranding the driver. This tends to make drivers furious, as evidenced in a recent Nissan Leaf thread somewhere on this forum. I suffered a similar premature empty tank in a '70s-era car, fortunately under more benign circumstances. Therefore nearly all fuel gauges and low fuel indicators and distance-to-empty displays have built in safety margin, often a large margin. The different pieces that you tried to correlate usually don't match up. Bob Wilson intentionally ran several tanks dry for our benefit. Your figures are consistent with my Prius experience, except that I haven't gone 600 miles on a tank. I believe that my three most recent cars before this had at least 100 miles of fuel range after the gauge read 'E', though only one was verified (and intentionally so). I never pushed the other two more than half that far.
Greetings. The DTE reading on the MDF is off. Probably on purpose. There's nothing like having people in a country littered with sniveling bed-wetting attorneys run out of gas when the MDF says you have 2 miles to go to give a (rich profitable) company a powerful incentive to fudge the numbers a bit. As others have pointed out, when the last pip starts flashing you're down to about 1.8 gallons of fuel remaining. If your driving is consistent, you can roll the dice and sputter into a gas station on a dry tank---but my testicular fortitude has always limited me to about 50 miles or so on the last pip. I've run out of gas before...albeit never recently, or in a G3. Yeah....you don't have to sweat glide slopes, but it's still not much fun. GOD has a sense of humor with people running out of gas which usually expresses itself in terms of weather, terrain, bad neighborhoods, or pending social engagements. Good Luck. Try not to push the fuel thing too much when you're doing the stick and rudder thing....OK?
Bob Wilson (seems to be inactive these days on PC) did 2 or 3 tests where he ran a 2010 out of fuel on purpose. I have noted his research showed approximately 2.1 gallons left when the last bar begins to blink. In theory, if you're cruising down the highway, you have about 100 miles after the bar starts blinking, but I wouldn't push it that far, on purpose. If you search for Bob's posts, he is very technical and loves to do research. I have run something like 40-50 miles past the last bar blinking. I have also pumped as much as 12.3 gallons of gas including a full top off. BTW Brady, what type of bird do you fly and how much fuel does it take to get off the ground?
I read somewhere that the miles to empty was computed from the instantaneous MPG not the average MPG. That would account for the difference.
