My wife has started to take the Prius when she drives to work (Long Island to New Jersey about 35 miles each way - 80% freeway miles). Without paying attention to the way she is driving she is averaging 55mpg. She just gets in it and drives. No traffic in the morning and NYC rush hour traffic at night. She was taking her Honda Element at about 22mpg.
Most of my first 600 miles was a combination commute from NJ to Brooklyn, NY in rush hour traffic combined with local errands. I used 11 gallons of gas so basically same here. Sometimes I've driven with an eye towards maximizing gas mileage without any formal training. Sometimes I've just driven regularly but rarely aggressively so far. I can't be more pleased. That, by the way, is with the AC running most of the time and typically one other passenger.
I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that Prius mileage is affected less by how you drive than by how far you drive. The extra gas used in the first five "warm-up" minutes strongly impacts your mileage if most of your trips are short. If most of your trips are long -- and I count 35 miles as long -- the warm-up period has only a minor impact. Your style of driving --aggressive, granny, or hypermiler -- surely has an impact, but it seems to be less than the warm-up cost.
Another NYC Metro Area driver here! I run all over the place with my 3-week-old Prius. On my first tank I averaged 50mpg, through a pretty diverse mix of traffic conditions-- Zipping along at 70mph on the Hutchinson River Parkway, crawling along at 5mph waiting to cross back into NYC on the always-congested GWB, or normal city street stop-and-go driving through Flushing. I never expected the Prius to be such a fun car to drive! B)
No question that the first 5 to 10 minutes of driving features mediocre gas mileage precisely as others here have explained. So a 5 minute drive isn't going to help much though typically most such drives are only a mile or so and thus don't drastically impact the bottom line. And I've actually made some 10-15 minute drives where the 2nd and/or 3rd 5 minute segment featured 75+mpg and still left me with a trip of 50-60mpg. It's truly amazing just how each section of the drive impacts the fuel consumption. There is, however, no doubt that aggressive driving has a huge cost on the Prius, on the order of 20-25% so do so with that in mind. I'm also finding that this thing LOVES moderate stop and go traffic where speeds vary from about 15 to 40mpg. Maybe it's how I drive but that type of driving which is common for my commute seems to bring out the best in the Prius.
clearly you need to take it back!! You should be getting 65mpg, clearly she's not responsible enough to drive it! Just kidding, of course. If you really wanna make yourself feel better... I estimate she drives ~17500 miles annually just for her commute. Let's round that up to 20,000 miles as a conservative annual driving distance for the Prius vs the Element comparison. Element : 910 gallons annually = $2780 of fuel (@$3.00/gal) Prius : 364 gallons annually = $ 1090 of fuel So that's about $1700 for an extra vacation this year! And barely a third of the fuel you've purchased from terrorists!
