Me too I will be getting dedicated snow tires on another set of wheels: probably Bridgestone WS80s, as I got a set last year for my passat diesel, but they're too big and I need smaller tires for the Prius. The ws80s were fantastic.
I filled up this morning before the long weekend, and my last tank was the best at 3.73L/100kms (63 us mpg). My average economy from new finally dropped to 3.9/100: Pépe (Toyota Prius) | Fuelly Tomorrow I'm getting the new 195/65x15" bridgestone blizzak ws90s installed on gen-2 prius wheels, and will be interested to see how much my fuel-usage goes up when the weather gets nasty.
I really like Michelin X-ice. Very good mpg for a snow tire, and the road feel of a good all season on bare roads.
I've been reading that the xi3 is a low-rolling resistance tire, where the blizzaks aren't; I didn't get to the tire shop on saturday, so I may get the michelin instead.
Here's an update on my AWD. Most of my MPG is read off the car display, so you can reduce accordingly (I don't recall what is the standard "Toyota optimism factor" - maybe 2%?). Anyhow, from a high of 56.7 mpg overall, in August, it's been dropping steadily and now at 55.3 overall. One problem is I do far fewer long drives after the school year begins; it's almost all 6-mile trips to and from the office, or short hops to the grocery store. The other problem is much colder weather. So combining the two, the engine spends much of the trip warming up. It's hard to see this pattern in real tank MPG since fill-ups are so infrequent. Since Sep. 7, I've had 4 fill-ups with real MPGs of 52, 55, 44, 60 respectively. In the summer, looks like real MPGs were around 56. We've also had a lot of snow, but the roads tend to clear within a few days. During really snowy times, short-hop MPGs are in the 20s. The AWD feature has been really effective though, and I'm very happy to have it. It's just about melted off now but for a week or so we looked like Antarctica here, with huge snow piles and lumpy ice ridges along the roads, etc. There was slippage as the car bounced around among the ice-holes, but I never once had trouble gaining traction.
After 4,000 miles (sorry Kilometres) my display finally went down to 4.4l/100 kms...... in my spreadsheet 4.5, I also am happy with this beautiful car. From my previous car not a Toyota, I have now halfed my consumption!
I had a younger black guy move into the neighborhood with an older Toyota. Saw him working on it one day, so I tried to be neighborly and offer my help. His car was making smoke out of the exhaust when running, so someone told him his engine was probably blown. Turns out he knew nothing of cars, and had filled his engine way, WAY high with oil. I lent him the tools, and instructed him on how to drain a lot of the oil out while I watched over him. He eventually ruined the car by other means by continually trying to fix things that weren't broken, and guessing at things that were broken. Crazy, as that old Toyota probably would have served him another 100,000 miles.