Should i be worried about putting miles on my 2021 Prius LE?

So the Prius isn’t really optimized for highway driving. It’s actually optimized for city driving where you’ll be doing more stopping and going than steady high speed driving which keeps the traction battery charged mainly via regeneration instead of via the gas engine. But, that said, you can drive your Prius as much as you want without worry. The only thing is you won’t get the best MPG with lots of highway driving.

 

yes. best practices recommend not driving it. can you get a rental?

 

No - that's what a car is for. Mine is mostly Motorway miles.

 

not mine, garage queen. gets a bath and a permanent every friday.

 

That is just not true - the design does not compromise highway fuel consumption to get good city fuel consumption. It does both.

Agreed, you won't get as good mpg at high speeds as at lower speeds, but that's physics. Nothing can be done about that.

If highway consumption was not important the design wouldn't have one of the best aerodynamic performances of any car. (CD in the range of 0.25).

There are only a small handful of cars that can get above 50mpg at highway speeds. I get about 52mpg in my 2017 Prius on long freeway trips with speeds around 70mph.

kevin

 

I agree - the best l/100km I've ever got is on longer runs on the Motorway.

 

Drive the car, enjoy it, you paid for it. If you are worried about resale value, I can understand that. But I buy a car to enjoy it, not to baby it for the next owner.

 

Yes - the first day we have the car - it's our baby, next month, we wash every mark off it - before it arrives.

Then after a year, we make a note that there's a mark which "have to get around to".

At 5 years - it's just for driving. And dreaming about what's coming next.

If you happen to have it for 10 years, you're wondering why you drove this for so long, as "NEW" cars are so much better now.

 

Oh - and enjoy it - besides enjoying it not costing much to run, it's quite a sweet running car.

 

http://www.fueleconomy.gov estimates 54 city and 50 highway. I don't know any other way to interpret this other than the car is optimized for city driving...


Practically every non-hybrid car I know of gets better highway MPG than city, for example the Toyota Corolla...

 

I interpret it as city driving having so many more opportunities to either squander or recover recover energy. There was no special focus on city driving to the exclusion of highway or else the car would not have such a crazy low coefficient of drag.

 

The 500miles/week translate to 26Kmiles/year. That's about twice as much as average distance driven on any cars out there. I have seen here people driving Prius more than three to five times of your annual distance. I am sure the Prius cabs and rental fleet put far more miles than you do. Yeah, you will be hitting the out of warranty time point sooner, and will have to do more frequent maintenance/year like oil change 2-3 times/year. But if that's the distance you have to drive, I would be far more comfortable driving a reliable and a long lasting car like Prius. I would have no worry. Just make sure you do the scheduled maintenance on the miles indicated not on months.

 

I can't argue with either interpretation of how the Prius is optimized.
apples / oranges = city / highway
both look good to me when compared to other cars.
I wonder what corolla with a plug would look like?

Hybrid LE
$23,400
starting msrp 1

5
seats
53 / 52
est. mpg see ref 77 2021 Toyota Corolla Hybrid | Meet the Complete Package
Hybrid Power Mode
7-in. color TFT Multi-Information Display
Smart Key System 88 with Push Button Start​

 

Never mind the car, it will do at least as well as any other car for that distance, and usually at lower cost.

Worry instead about how many miles are being put on yourself.

That is mostly an artifact of a kludgy empirical rating scale designed mostly around a traditional car. Don't over-interpret it.

The underlying test cycles have average speeds of 21.2 mph on the City test, 48.3 mph on the Highway test. Lower steady speeds produce higher mpg in all cars, but the stop-and-go use in the slower City test generally squanders this lower speed benefit. The Prius manages to save part of this lower speed benefit, whereas traditional gassers squander all of it, and then some.

There is another element to this difference. The EPA numbers are based upon the original CAFE tests, then discounted significantly by empirical fudge factors. The City number is discounted only 10%, but the Highway number is discounted more, 28%. Old cars got so much higher Highway than City test figures that nobody noticed. But the Prius had almost identical Highway and City CAFE tests, so the differing discounts down to EPA scale are more noticeable. (Note that this simplicity was for old EPA scale, pre-2007. Various revisions and extra tests added in 2007 and later add more complexity, and produce less City-Highway difference for hybrids than back on the original Priuses and Honda Insights. Go back and look at the original EPA figures before 2007 to see just how much difference they used to have. )

 

The battery doesn't get any better with age, and fuel is very cheap now.

So if driving the car more somehow helps you achieve more of your goals then drive all you can now- it'll never be a better deal!

The other way to answer the question:

A 10 year old Prius with 100k miles isn't worth much more than a 10 year old Prius with 200k miles.

 

??

 

A car is made to drive.
What exactly do you think there is to worry about ?

I don't understand the question.
Is there an alternative ??

 

The rate is above the norm of 15k/yr. You'll be out of the bumper to bumper warranty in 18 months, powertrain warranty in 2.5 years and the 150k mile CARB warranty in a little over 6 years.

 

I guess the reality isn't always what the OFFICIAL figures show.

I had, in the early '90s, a MITSUBISHI STARWAGON (EXPRESS) 8 seater. Mine was 4sp AUTO - and the official figure showed it was considerably more economical than the 5 speed Manual.

HaHa - a mate had the same vehicle in Manual - he was a harder driver, but got considerably better economy than mine.

I quizzed Mitsubishi - no answer, but the dealer's mechanic said "yes, obviously the test favoured the AUTO - but real life driving favoured the MANUAL". He said it often happened.