San Francisco - San Jose morning commute

Something about SF Bay and Northern California always brings out the best in a Prius... I always get my best MPG in that region...

 

You seem to live in a magical world where the price mpg keeps going up and price of gas keeps going down... Seeing as your morning commute couldn't be any better and keeps getting better, I fear what the rest of your day must be like to balance things out?

 

You are correct, when you add gas, it will give you the option to change this. If you don't, for whatever reason, such as the maintenance light is on and won't let you. You can go into the panel and change this if you missed it.

 

related: I notice that there's an option to enter the MPG of your previous car. Once you give it this info, the display (if I'm remembering this right) stops listing the trip cost and replaces that line with trip savings vs. old car.

I kind of wish it tracked both but only showed cost on the default display. I haven't messed with it too much.

6 months with this car has made me realize that I actually want none of this data while driving, and all of it when away from the car. We have gradually settled upon leaving the dash display set to 'simple mode' with just a gas gauge. And with the stock stereo/MFD thing 86'd to make way for an aftermarket head unit, we are now totally free of the energy monitor/spreadsheet/video game stuff.

Still working on the "data while away from car" part.

 

Well... I'd like the data, but a continuous security leak to the cloud would be enough to put me off of the car altogether.

Honestly I wish the key worked as removable storage, but I think BMW holds a patent on that and hasn't cared to license it out.

 

Help is on the way: Gas prices heading for 'colossal collapse' ahead of midterm elections

 

It's a bit hazy. It's certainly happening on cars where there is already a subscription-based courtesy service like OnStar, and in other cars there is a link between the car and the driver's phone, where an app can communicate telematics back to a central point. Still others have wifi and can periodically connect and update, e.g. when parked at home.

I'm not aware of any telematic system on our 2018 c 2. Even when we plug our phones into the dashboard, they are connecting to a Sony aftermarket head unit that I installed to gain carplay/android, and it doesn't have much communication with the rest of the car.

I'm still exposed to the risks of whatever my smartphone is leaking on its own, but I long ago decided to accept that trade-off for utility's sake and is another topic altogether.

 

Most cars these days have the equivalent of a black box so the car manufacturer can prove the accident was the fault of the driver, not them... As you might imagine consumer advocates have a bit of a privacy argument, not to mention how unfair it is... But this technology has been around for a long time.

Just use your OBD2 and Hybrid Assisstant and Hybrid Reporter app on a drive in a 12 year old Prius and you can see how most of this data is really easy to get. They also have parenting apps that gives remote real time data for when you loan your car out to your teenage kid... Sure glad we didn't have that when I was growing up, I would of never been able to drive if they could of seen what I was doing.

Pushing the envelope as always is Tesla, who last Spring released to the media all the black box data from a fatal accident within days of it occuring. The NTSB who had barely started their investigation kicked Tesla out of the investigation for that stunt:

NTSB Revokes Tesla’s Party Status



Tesla has since been more reserved about how it defends itself after fatal accidents...

 

Sure, there are event recorders in every car now, and have been in some dating back to the 1980s. That data stays local and has already proven to be extremely useful in improving car safety over the years. There's also a lot of good case law (and some bad) on its ownership and use. I've long been (generally) comfortable with that.

But I never want to be party to the sort of thing Tesla did in your example, or the many possible variations that could unfold. One way to protect oneself from that is to keep the data locally. At least until we invent information that can change itself conditionally based on usage or intent.

 

We still live in the wild west when it comes to data privacy laws... And we all know who not to vote for if we want this protection sooner than later....