Slowing down to 35 on an interstate when you can maintain the speed limit is unsafe and discourteous to other drivers if you don't think so stay in the right lane!
Sorry but I can't completely agree with that. Everybody pretty much expects certain vehicles to slow down rapidly on steep upgrades; included are big trucks, motor homes and smoking clunkers. The posted speed limits in those kinds of places are already lower. People don't expect to see your average vehicle going slower than the posted limit. If you DO, a rear end collision is possible.
"... and I believable that the amount of economy loss he is fretting over is surprisingly small." Yes, that too.
There is also the matter of road rage. Is it really worth a bit more economy to risk being shot or deliberately rammed by the dude with a 4 foot high bumper on his pickup? I'm not being facetious.
Yet another reason to not live in SoCal. Much of the rest of the country doesn't have that degree of road rage.
I've lived in 7 different states and metro areas including SoCal. I have also traveled to nearly every state. I can say that this is not unique to SoCal one bit. In fact I found it much worse on the East coast.
I've lived in a number of different areas of the country as well including Alaska, Denver, SoCal, NorCal, NJ, NY and NC. At this point, if I somehow got plopped down somewhere and I had my eyes closed, I'd be hard pressed to tell where I was. Drivers throughout the US are awful. Doesn't seem to matter where you're at. Tailgating, aggressive driving, speeding and general lack of consideration for others is a national problem. And I'll bet it's not limited to this country.
How defensively must one drive to be "safe" Just today I was passed TWICE where there was a double yellow line on a 2 lane road with a 55 MPH limit. In both cases, I was, and had been for several miles, driving with Cruise set at 62 MPH. FWIW the most economical range of ICE power is about 13 hp to 40 hp and on my PIP that corresponds, according to Torque, to 1/4" right of center on the HSI bar to above the W in "PWR" on the right end of the bar.
If your eyes were closed I guessed you be able to tell via smell or sounds. I'm not going to say where you'd be able to tell from smells...but the sound of many horns honking used to be NYC...but much better the last time I was there. Anyway, would you really want to drive with your eyes still closed? Mike
I suspect he was looking at the Prius 1.8L engine BSFC chart. Look at the fuel efficiency contours, figure the lower and upper RPMs where the decline from peak is still acceptable, read the corresponding torques from the normal operating line, and compute the power of each. His numbers sound familiar. This exercise will not account for the varying HSD losses through the electrical power path. In steady level cruising, the bulk of the ICE power goes through the mechanical path to the wheels. But during acceleration and mountain climbing, a larger fraction is directed through the electrical path, where additional energy conversions cut efficiency.
Sure, it isn't unique to So/Nor/Cal. But neither is it universal. I have been having relatively little problem driving in my region at speed limit in 60 zones, under limit in 70 zones, especially since the Hurricane Katrina shoved fuel prices above $2/gallon. I can count on one hand the number of vehicles that tried to physically shove me off the road in the last three decades for not exceeding the posted speed limit, and none of them happened this century. The two that happened in the right-most lane where from full tractor-trailers with far out-of-state license plates. The only one in the left lane was from an extremely impatient lone-occupant who didn't notice, for about a mile, that this new HOV lane had finally received its HOV paint over the weekend. The last, on a single lane road, apparently didn't knew that we were entering a notorious speed trap. Fear of getting shot? Hardly. In this state, something like 8% of the adult population has the license needed to be legally equipped to shoot back, even though doing so would almost never be justified. But the resulting natural selection pressures push most of the would-be road rage shooters to move to SoCal, where their risk of encountering return fire is much lower.
Here is a tip. The higher the speed, the easier you can stay out of PWR region. If you see a long uphill coming, speed up. I suspect HSI takes account of the loss in electric path. If the engine makes a lot of power at relative slow speed, the extra power gets split into electric path through the generator->inverter->motor, with conversion loss. To avoid that and maximize direct mechanical drive, you want to stay near midway (ideally) before PWR region. It is fun to plan and manage to stay in the ideal zone.
The 13 to 40 hp range comes from the widely published BFC graph of the 1.8L Prius Gen 3 engine as Fuzzy1 suggests. By looking at the constant power contours and where they intersect the HSD operating line while the HSD operating line is within the highest fuel efficiency region (the constant power lines are at 10KW and 30KW approximately). I then convert 10KW to 13HP and 30 KW to 40 HP. The next step is my personal observation on my PIP, while driving and observing ICE output as reported through "Torque", 13 hp corresponds to 1/4" right of center on the HSI and 40 HP is above the space between the W an R of PWR on the far right. Operating in this region the ICE efficiency of a Gen 3, 1.8L engine is GREATER than was possible with the GEN 2, 1.5 L engine. Fuzzy1 is absolutely correct in stating that this IGNORES the variable efficiency of the HSD. The HSD will have peak efficiency when MG1 is not turning at all, a CVT ratio of 1x1, at any other CVT ratio it's efficiency will fall with greater power flow as the I squared R losses of the MG!- MG2 electrical path increase. Fortunately the CVT has very good efficiency.
"You mean 30 kW (40hp). That's where the max efficiency at 220 g/kWh, ends." YES! Thank you for catching my typo!
