New to hybrids, New to here

Congrats and welcome to PC.

The car does not provide that information, but there are other devices that can be added to give you that information but the results are unreliable because it is based on average miles per gallon for that tank, which can change. Just get gas when 2 PIPS are displaying on your gas gauge.

Also, do NOT top off the tank when you fill it up. Although it has a 11.9 gallon tank, there is a bladder that lines the tank, which has a variable capacity depending on many factors.

Keep reading the forum for information, but a good intro site is: http//john1701a.com

 

Yup, that'll do it. If you want to try to coax a little more fuel in you can fill at half speed, giving the bladder a little more time to expand. Just don't try to put more in once it stops.

It would be very handy to to have a D2E gauge, but I think as you mention with the amount of computation going on its no accident they left it out. Its tricky to estimate how much fuel is in the tank at any given time due to the bladder. The car generally does a pretty good job of it, but there is some variability. Because the size of the tank changes from fillup to fillup, the effective "size" of each pip on the gauge will also vary from tank to tank, and as the computer refines its estimate of how much fuel is left in the tank.

As long as you fillup before the last pip starts flashing (or immediately after) you should never have a problem. On long trips, if you know you won't have access to fuel you just have to play it a little conservative. This is generally not a big issue, as you generally get more miles out of a tank than a traditional car.

Congrats and enjoy!

Rob

 

You can adjust the microphone sensitivity. There are instructions on this forum.

As for calculating the remaining miles of fuel, there is a good reason that the Prius doesn't offer this calculation. Being much more efficient than a normal car, the mileage figures for the Prius vary widely with driving conditions. The number of remaining miles varies with these conditions, meaning you have to know in advance what sort of driving you are going to do if you want meaningful miles to empty calculations.

Look at it from the other side: I used to own a Jeep C-J5 with a 304 V8 engine. That Jeep would get about 15 mpg under any circumstances. Drive it slow you got 15 mpg. Drive it fast you got 15 mpg. At most you would see a swing of about 2 mpg. With 3 gallons of remaining gas that 3 mpg swing means an error of about 6 miles.

The mileage in my Prius easily swings from 42 mpg to 60 mpg. That's a swing of 18 mpg. All of a sudden that remaining 3 gallons has an error of 54 miles. I suspect Toyota worried about drivers running out of gas and blaming them for bad data, so they took the conservative approach and didn't provide the calculation.

Tom

 

Scan Gauge can show you a figure that says the miles left on the tank.