640 miles range

From FuelEconomy.gov:


Published range is based on official EPA ratings.

I believe the total range is (fuel tank size) * (best of city or highway EPA MPG ratings) + EPA Electric Range. Since Prii generally have better City than Highway ratings, this range probably means at city speeds, not at 60 mph.

Also, it means running the car to actual fuel starvation. If you fill up when the car warns you to fill up, rather than ignoring that warning and instead continuing until the car is really out of fuel, then you'll come up short on range. Put another way, that range requires burning up the entire fuel safety margin, which on a Prius is quite a bit.

At what point have you been filling up?

 

How fast are you driving the vehicle and how hilly are the roads? 405 miles estimated gas range seems low, but could be influenced by how you drive it and the roads you’re driving on. My DTE for gas is normally 500 to 520 miles. I normally drive ~73 mph on the freeway with a few hundred feet elevation gain each direction of my ~20 mile commute.

 

the posted range leaves you dead in the boondocks, but it is reasonably accurate.

tesla gets called out on this all the time, as if gassers are different.

the dte does not include the 'safety' amount in the tank so you won't get stranded in said boondocks

 

How full is your tank? Did the nozzle click off and you pulled it out, or did you top it off (without spilling, of course, and we don't want liquid gasoline in the evaporative vapor canister).

 

If your getting high 500 miles per approx. 10 gallon tank - I'd call that a win. My GMC can barely get 350 miles on a 25 gallon tank.

The 600 miles is an average, I wouldn't dwell on it too much. FWIW; I'm averaging close to 1K miles a tank, once a month fill-ups 40 miles round trip commute to work and back on a single charge, everyday. No real gas usage on the weekends, unless I have a trip planned. Weekend runs can be done on EV only; most of the time.

 

In reel world driving, if the Prime is driven without the engine on more than it's driven with the engine on, the estimate goes up relative to the percentage of miles driven.

 

Because your "range" includes multiple recharges, it isn't even related to the EPA's posted "range". There are other Prime drivers who get nearly infinite "range" per tank of gasoline because they drive almost entirely in EV, recharging daily or twice daily, and burn fuel out the gas tank infrequently and only to prevent it from becoming too stale.

EPA "range" is figured starting with a full battery, but no recharges allowed. People wishing to get this range must drive in a manner and circumstances that match or exceed the EPA 54 MPG rating, and consume the entire 11.4 gallon tank. If you stop to refill when the low fuel warning light turns on, you have consumed only about 9.7 gallons, or less. (Many of us drivers of an older generation found the warning light turning on earlier than indicated in the manual, providing greater safety margin.) To get the EPA-state range, keep going until the engine quits!! Or hypermile for greater MPG to provide some safety buffer.

That so-called 'range' is a semi-useful fiction. In the real world, we must leave some safety margin both for lack of refueling availability at the exact spot we run out, and to account for the annoying reality that MPG is very highly variable, depending on conditions and usage and driver style. Very many people and conditions can't match EPA ratings.

 

For the ultimate test, run out of gas.

If you got the time, this 16 minute video shows what happens when you run out of gas on a Prius Prime.

 

Very informative, and quite different from what my 2004 used to do. (It went 1-2 miles on electric after running out of gas, but with all the warning lights on. Being able to totally drain the battery got me to a gas station in one case.)

Has anyone truly run out of gas and electricity (without the unrecognized fuel in the tank, as shown in this video) on a 2017+ Prime ?

 

A long time member here (though for now I must refrain from typing his name) has intentionally run all his Prii (Gen1,Gen3, Prime) to the point of losing propulsion, and reported results. Here is the Prime thread.

[WARNING] Running out of gas | PriusChat

 

I used to get 70 to 74 mpg from just the good old 2016 Prius with inline-4. But that was when I was driving stuck in local traffic. 15 to 30 mph maximum on local roads and streets. I had a fully empty car too. Nowadays I throw too much crap in the back of the trunk and roof...

I think it can be done. These are excellent machines. Seriously. 700 miles to 740 miles on a tank of gas? amazing.... But you have to be in bumper to bumper traffic and not exceeding 65 mph.

which come to think of it is most of civilized driving anyway.

 

On a trip to CA from OR last year I averaged 56mpg on the highway (pure hybrid mode). At no point did I ever get a DTE over 450 miles. At no point did I ever drive past past the quarter tank line either. A refill never took close to 10 gallons. I find the DTE a wildly inaccurate number no matter how I drive. It always vastly overestimates EV range and vastly underestimates gas range.

 

The gasoline range number does not include a very significant amount of fuel set aside as a safety margin.

Many drivers have a very poor understanding of just how how much fuel consumption varies with driving conditions and style. If DTE didn't set aside a very significant safety margin, a lot of drivers would occasionally get caught on the wrong side of that variability. And Customer Service would get many angry calls from drivers complaining "at the start of my trip, the display said I had enough fuel to get there, but then it ran out of gas, stranding me in the middle of no-where on a dark and stormy night!"

Leaving a big safety margin by underestimating the gas range, sharply cuts down on those calls. When drivers do get stranded in these circumstances, as some humans inevitably do, at least they can't honestly complain that they didn't have enough warning, so can't blame anyone but themselves. Also known as 'customer expectation management.'

 

yes, by all means lets engineer for the lowest common denominator

 

I notice that the Distance Till Empty estimate varies by at least 200 miles for me, depending on how much EV exclusive driving I do. And I'm sure that estimate can vary a lot more than that if driving only EV for thousands of miles between a fillup, which isn't totally unreasonable, unusual.sure, but surely not impossible.
But, after an unusually high dte estimate due to a lot of EV driving, the estimate will be wildly off the mark initially and for several / many fillups, after the driver decides to switch to using HV mode and the engine more while using EV only driving less.

A lot of owners complain about the estimates the Prime makes, for whatever reasons they might dislike them.

 

In my case I had driven for a year of almost exclusively EV before a 1400 mile highway trip on HV only. The very FIRST tank had a DTE of 450 miles. I filled the tank some 500 miles later at a quarter of a tank and it took less than 9 gallons of gas. Conversely I'll charge my car and the miles remaining will be 27 and due to the area I live (hilly and cold) some 12 miles later I'm nearly dead. Both are wildly inaccurate but in opposite directions. Don't get me wrong, I'm not mad or anything about it, just puzzled as to how bad the system is at estimation. I mean I could just spitball some conservative numbers based on the lunar cycle and probably be more accurate than a car which has historical data.

 

A couple years ago I drove from Seattle to Denver area and back with my son to pick up some special rims for his MR2. We took the P-Prime because saving gas was a priority. But it was not a huge priority. We went South thru Oregon and Idaho where the speed limit was 80. Set the cruise control on 90 and just drove. I kept track of gas used and miles driven with pencil and paper. At the end of the trip I had averaged 45 MPG. So now I know, no matter how I drive, I can always get more than 45 MPG on my 2017 P-Prime.
Ray

 

I can't think up a way I'd ever see a dte of 450 miles after driving a year of almost all EV. I'm not saying it didn't happen to you, I just can't imagine it from my experience. To much missing history data for that year?
I also can imagine your GuessOmeter (GOM as some like to call it here ) reading 27 miles of EV and you running out of EV range is only 17 miles. It's not to hard to imagine how that might happen, I'm sure I could run my current 50km EV range ( I recently switched to metric ) 30 miles EV range in probably less than 15 miles, easy.
Is the horrible dte estimate or lunar cycle accuracy thing really that much of an issue?

 

"User Interfaces" nearly require such. That is no reflection on the underlying engineering.

Please do remember that half the users / customers have below-average engineering ability. That is a huge base of potential customers to forego.