2012 Toyota Prius Plug-In: By The Numbers, Would It Work For You?

i think the ice has to warm up for each outing whether used or not. and probably has to keep itself warm if not used during the trip? that would be wasted gas so it's not all attributable to the 22 miles. plus as said above, was he in pure ev the rest of the time? can only assume so.

 

It appears to be the worse case for Prius PHV. They charged it seven times (suggesting 7 trips) over 103 miles. If you do the math, that's 14.7 miles per trip. That just a little over the plugin battery limit to ensure the gas engine will be used for a very short time.

This would be the same if they drive a cordless Prius for only 5 minutes and getting 25 mpg due to the warmup. Then calculate the payback in comparison with a non-hybrid. It is a nice "trick" to make Prius PHV look bad and using it to calculate the PHV lifetime payback. Not every trip will be just above 14 miles.

Keep in mind that the final production version will have an EV button. This will allow you to disable the EV mode so you can use the gas engine at the best time to reduce gas consumption in such situations. For example, if you have 15 miles trip, you may want to use HV mode in the first few miles to get heat. Perhaps, you may want to use HV mode in the section with some hills, highway merges, etc... The goal is to club together the ICE assist situations.

The bottom line is they got overall 90.8 mpg (pulgged). A cordless Prius would probably do 1/3 that mpg for that length of trip.

 

Does the Owner's Manual or even any presentations indicate anywhere that you shouldn't charge it full all the time? Like to maybe 80% like the Leaf manual suggests? Is there any recommendations about charging at all? Like 240 V over 110 V?

Yeah I read the article and got the point about having a garage. Got that part covered.

 

i'm sure the charger will charge it properly to whatever toyota feels is the best compomise between efficiency and longevity. the owner only need plug it in at every and any opportunity.

 

AHa, that's obviously not right. Maybe if it was a Volt

 

They managed to get 220 Wh/mile. InsideLine got lower electricity and gas consumption from Prius PHV when they compared with the Volt.

 

I haven't seen a meaningful gas-only comparison between the PHV and non-PHV. I've seen people who have done a couple of tiny trips saying I used to get this in my normal Prius but nothing that's statistically sound with enough miles to matter. I find it unlikely this can beat a normal Prius on the highway because of its extra weight. In the city for a gentle driver it would probably do a bit worse (again because of weight), and a gentle driver doesn't often exceed regen of their normal Prius. For others, though, if this has more aggressive regen, then braking that normally hits friction brakes may not in this case, and that would help. But this is just conjecture until we get EPA numbers or someone has put hundreds of or thousands of miles on the cars and ideally on the same day on the same track or road with a buddy next driving similarly.

 

You know maybe we could work this backwards to find out how much gasoline is burned in "EV" mode in the PHV.

Lets say it actually got 50 mpg for the 25 non-EV miles, that would be about 1/2 a gallon right? Then the other .63 gallons was used on the 77.7 "ev" miles, for an average fuel consumption in EV mode of over 123 mpg (plus the electricity).

Thats pretty good, burns 2.5 times less gas in EV mode (is that the accurate way to say that?)

 

Volt doesn't make any sense either, at least comparing to current GEN III. Need for overnight charge pretty much limits total electric miles per year to 35mi *365 =~12,500mi (best case). As a gas it gets 38MPG on premium. If you drive it as electric only you save a couple hundred dollars a year (~240 according to fueleconomy.gov). With that it would take 40years to recover additional 10,000$ when comparing to base Prius. If you drive double of national avg (30K+) Volt will cost more per mi then current Prius due to poor gas MPG and premium fuel. Even if you get free charging at work, x2 electric, and your commute 35mi one way, it will still take 15-20 years to recover additional 10K on purchase.

 

And the latest I heard was about $2000 over the comparible package of a regular Prius not 3-5,000. And of course in California the new GREEN carpool is worth at least that. The silver sticker for the Leaf would not help since I could not go to LA and back on 1 charge (less than 100 miles) and the infrastructure for charging in the "OC" and "LA" is meager at best.

 

cyclopathic, you sure did your homework and made the smart choice!

 

Weight doesn't have much affect on highway mileage.

 

Yep.

The car will need improved regen proportional to the weight increase to not be a dog in city MPG.

 

Since each driver's situation is different, here is a spreadsheet that might help this debate. It contains the variables mentioned in this article. Feel free, power users, to improve on it.

Basically it says that for short daily drives, like this one, of 15 miles/day with gas averaging $4/gal, the PHV will save approximately $1500 over 6 years. Assuming a tax credit of $2500 for the PHV (see hybridcars website), it would have to cost more than $4000 over the standard Prius to not be cost effective.

That's not counting the intangibles, which are priceless. For instance, how do you feel about your Prius decison every time the price of gas goes up?

 

Just out of curiosity what assumptions did you make to determine the 17 cents of fuel use each day in the PHV prius? Is that just 2 miles a day beyond range or an estimate of how much gas you'd burn accelerating or traveling at highway speeds?

 

i was actually just thinkin about this.... i'd be really interested in what kind of mileage it gets past the EV miles. I have a total commute of 96miles a day

 

Me, too. Nobody has posted that figure over a meaningful (read: acceptably long as to prove meaningful) distance. Assumptions are it will be similar. I think it will be. I suspect very marginally worse due to extra weight but not much. That is, unless they have further improvements elsewhere but I don't think they do. I think it's a 2011 with plug in range and extra weight. Maybe the engine can run harder when filling battery, though, which would be helpful to mileage.

 

not necessarily.. if PHEV battery has higher charge/discharge rate and firmware had been re-programmed to take advantage of it, you'd see improvements in Hybrid mode.. more regenerative recovery and Stealth mode at higher speeds.

 

Argh, yep forgot about regen, it seems like it should be much more powerful.