I have finished adding an article to my Prius Gen 3 blog, called "Urban driving FE - a real life case analysis". It took me 10 months to gather enough data to write the article and draw some conclusions on the experience I make every day driving to work. The results were for me quite startling. Essentially (apart the fact that predictive driving is what promotes fuel efficiency for me) no matter what I do, what temperature, time of day, traffic, etc. - on average I will always do 5L/100km on my leg from home to the office... This means I can relax and forget about looking at the indication of fuel consumption each day, since I will always make 5L/100km on average, no matter what. Always 5L/100km. Thanks for reading, commenting, suggesting on this article. It took me a long time to prepare and to write. Please also let me know if you find any errors or changes are necessary. If you would like me to add some charts/analysis on the data that I have gathered over the months, please let me know, as I might have overlooked something, possibly interesting.
pakitt: I enjoyed reading your very thorough and comprehensive analysis. I'm not a daily driver any more. If I was, I might try a similar analysis with my new Plug-In Prius. I'm sure others will be posting their plug-in analyses here. I need to go back and re-read your analysis again to gleen more information. Thanks for sharing it with us.
Definitely a good case study for anyone who's interested in buying a Prius as a commuter vehicle. Thanks!
Your data are very nice. The regression lines clearly show interesting trends and the plots provide a good feel for variability. In looking at my mileage data, I've wondered how much of the poorer mileage in low temperatures was due to winter tires. Your first plot provides a clear answer for the tires that you use. Temperature, not tires is clearly more important. Thank you for all of your work on this project!
Great work! I drive mostly within the city, with a lot of bumper to bumper crawl. Weather is not an issue here since we have tropical weather. The salient points in your analysis, namely the high correlation between average speed and fuel efficiency, is largely consistent with my own personal observation. While I haven't actually compiled data in such details, but I have observed the following fuel consumption levels: 4.4l/100km with average speed of 20kmph. 4.9l/100km with average speed of 18kmph. 6l/100km with average speed of 15kmph. At highway speeds (average speed of 90+kmph), I was able to get around 3.5l/100km. My average distance to work is around 9km. I did find significant variability (more than 20%) between the trip to work, and the return trip. I think this could be due to minor difference in the elevation (although it is not obvious and I am only making a guess to explain the variance).
Thanks for bearing out my thoughts in two weeks with my new 2012. One can obsess about the mpg from watching the computer, but in the end at close to 50mpg the differences don't matter as much.
Just posted this on my blog. Considering fuel prices reaching 1.6€/L in Germany and 2€/L in Italy, I am happy I bought a Prius!
