Went from getting 50 to getting 46. Same drive and going the same speed. Wondering what tire pressure I should have in the tires. I see what they say for max but wanted to know if you know of a good amount to get best gas mileage. Thanks for the help!
Hi All, New tires will always be worse than well worn tires. Depending on what tires you bought, they may or may not come back up to what your old tires worked at, in the next 2000 miles. Allot of the new Prius break in is the tires. I changed tires at 5000 miles, and went from 58 mpg to 50 for the next two months. People use 42 psi for the front two tires, and 40 psi for the rears on Prius. For best mileage, safety (best hydroplaning performance amoung other things) and maneuvering, CleanMPG (and Police driving instructors) recommends maintaining the same front to back bias, but making the max pressure of the highest pressure tires equal to the sideway max pressure.
Search is your friend. This has been covered scores, hundreds, maybe more times on this forum. Losing mileage with new tires until they are broken in is normal. How much you recover depends on the tire and how you run them. Unfortunately, you didn't state what tires you had originally, or what you put on (size, brand, model). Without knowing what tires are on your car it is difficult to recommend a specific tire pressure. Probably best to search the forum on your brand/tire model to find out what others have reported. What pressure(s) did you run before? If you don't know then it is going to be hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison.
It took me about 10,000 miles on my Assurance Triple Treds to get enough break-in to get my mileage back up to the 60 MPG range.