This week my husband and I took our almost 3yr old on a 4 day vacation to Idyllwild in the San Jacinto mountains (from home in San Diego). Until we got to the base of the mountain, our freeway driving averaged 48mpg, and once we climbed the mountain (pretty much in the power mode the entire time) and arrived at our cabin it had averaged 43mpg. On the way home, we only checked our mpg at the trip's end back in San Diego, but with all that slow downhill driving and hitting rush hour SD traffic, we had averaged 63.9mpg on our 111mi, 2h40m drive! :rockon:
If that is 43 there and 63.9 back....53.5 mpg round trip. Awesome, and actually darn good. We are doing some traveling with the 12 Prius 3G not the C. SO our numbers may be a bit lower. But I calculated about $450 for a 6000mile journey. That would be Cali and back to PA! We want to see many places, so we will be hitting some mountains along the way. Prob wouldn't be that high mpg, but ya never know!
I should clarify that on the way there, we were just looking at the MPG on our trip meter (we'd just filled up the night before). We forgot to check the actual MPG on the trip summary screen when you stop the car. Should be pretty close I expect.
Math alert: You can't average MPG that way. For example, if you drive 10 miles uphill and get 10 MPG, you've used a gallon of gas. If you now drive 10 miles downhill and get 100 MPG, you've used .1 gallon of gas. The actual average MPG is 20 miles / 1.1 gallon, or 18.2 MPG, not the average of 100 and 10, which would be 55 MPG. The OP used an average, which makes it look better than it really is. This example just makes it a lot more obvious. Richard
