Anyone get to 500 mpg?

That’s good to know.

 

Yeah, if you want to find out how sealed it is, try opening it up like you're going to fill the tank. But before you try filling it, press the filler door switch. That tells the car that the door is closed and fueling is done. Stand back and get ready for a big stinky mess as the gas comes gushing back out of the filler pipe when you start pumping.

The early models had a lot of owners upset because some gas nozzles would hit that button, making for a big surprise when the owner squeezed the pump handle. There are several threads here about it.

There's also a note in the owner's manual to wait for the "ready to fuel" message to appear after you open the fuel door. Apparently mine unseals faster than the car can display the message because I haven't seen it yet. However, I haven't bought gas all that many times yet.

 

Not exactly wrong, more like outdated and hasn't caught up to the new realities.

If you look back a ways on conventional cars, he would be right. But emissions standards have changed over the years, requiring (among other things) better control of fuel tank air exchange with the outside. All cars have had to do this, but PHEVs (Prius Prime, Plug-in-Prius, Volt, and some others) needed to step up to an even higher new standard than have conventional cars and hybrids.

 

That’s really awesome to know. I’ll let him know. He has a RAV4 Hybrid. We where hoping to get him a RAV4 Prime but with so few of them and the mark ups we are going to wait a while until they come back down to earth in price or until something better comes along.

We have been really amazed by the Prius Prime. I absolutely love it.

 

That is interesting. I haven’t noticed a ready to fuel indicator but maybe that is just because I have a habit of opening it up then putting my card in and getting the pump ready. I did see on the fuel door a warning about not leaving the fuel door open for too long before starting to refuel the vehicle. That must be part of the system you’re talking about.

 

A 1/4-full tank would hold about 40 liters of air. Even at 100% humidity and 80°F at sea level that air could only hold about 808 milligrams of water. If every molecule of water in that air condensed into the fuel you'd increase the fuel's moisture content by about 80 parts per million. That could happen about 6 times before you reached the allowable fuel moisture content limits used around the world of 500 parts per million.

 

Me too. My fuel door opens nearly instantly, but the manual says it can take up to 10 seconds.

Yup.

PS: I looked for and didn't find a reference to a warning message about waiting on the fuel tank pressure to equalize. Maybe it was on the PiP? Yup!! Sorry about that. I looked in my PiP manual and that's where I remember the message from: