Hi All, Question for you all. Last night I was driving my Prius C home and ran into a concerning issue. My car showed I had two bars left on the fuel gauge but when I looked at the screen that showed how many miles to empty - it had listed about 6-8 miles to empty when I filled up. I filled up the tank with 8 gallons. I believe the car has almost a 9 gallon tank so I should have had about 35-45 miles left on the car ? Which is the most accurate gauge of how much fuel is left? The fuel gauge itself or the estimated miles to empty? I recall one drive where the fuel gauge was at 2, and dropped to 0 bars (blinking red) so I hadn't been relying on that too much.
Neither. Some safety margin is built into both, but make use of that margin at your own risk. Many other threads in the regular GenIII forum discuss this. I usually point readers to the very first post if this long thread: [WARNING] Running out of gas (Gen III), but the general subject of fuel gauging & distance to empty display vs actual fuel tank level is discussed in many other threads too. The short answer is that the bottom of your fuel gauge, and the '0' miles of the distance to empty, are not at the real bottom of the tank. And your C is different than the Liftback in Bob's thread above.
You should trust the one that seems most reasonable over time. That time, the gauge was closer and the DTE was obviously off. The DTE figures in your MPG so if it was reporting a horrendously poor MPG for some reason, the DTE would be off too. Just keep an eye on them. Mine seem to track pretty good.
My new c1 finally went down to the last bar. Fill up took about 8 gallons. My gas cost is $4.31/gal for 100%PURE gasoline with NO ethanol rated at 89octane. I hope the 100% pure ups my mileage instead of the now normal alcohol-diluted gas usually sold in Hilo Hawaii.
So.....here we go again with the "demon" ethanol discussion. E10 has about 4% less energy content than pure gas. If y0u are paying more than 4% extra for that pure gas, you are wasting your money. If regular E10 unleaded sells for $4.00, for example, you would be money ahead ONLY if the E0 fuel cost was less than 16 cents more. The price difference likely is a LOT more than that so you probably are losing money overall.
The fuel gauge reads directly off of the sensor in the tank. The "how many miles left" widget is a computer program that takes the fuel in the tank, how you're driving it, and a few other things into consideration to arrive at a guesstimate. It is not a direct reading of the fuel level in the tank, and shouldn't be relied upon to plan your travels.
not sure how many pips are inthe C. buton the 2010 iv. there are 10. I look at at as one pip for every gallon of gas. and so far when I filled up with one pip flashing I've been putting in a tick more than ten gallons. which gets me about 450 miles. this means about nearly 2 gallons of gas still sloshing around in the tank. which is enough of a safety net for me. essentially meaning I have about 90 miles of range still left in the gas tank.
Scan gauge 2 .... it's great to keep track of fuel used and how much is left in tank..... and other readings like engine temp. , etc
