Advertised MPG overrated?

You shouldn't need to resort to "pulse and glide" driving techniques, or even change your driving technique to average 55mpg in town. All it should take is longer trips (where you amortize that 25mpg for the first five minutes while the engine warms up over more miles) and obeying speed limits.

I typically average low to mid 40s because of my short commute and excessive speed, but on a warm engine, I can easily average 55mpg in town by just driving at the speed limit and using a light touch on the accelerator.

I don't think my Prius is defective just because I choose to drive it in such a way that gets worse mpg. The fact that I can get within 10% of EPA city and 2% of EPA highway if I watch my speed and take longer trips tells me my car is working as designed.

 

I, too, have been disappointed in the mileage I am getting driving in town. I had been driving a Volkswagen Jetta TDI (diesel) about 8 miles to work on relatively level streets at speed limits of 25 and 30 MPH and was getting about 45 MPG (hard to tell exactly because I also did some highway driving). My Prius gets closer to 40 MPG over the same route under the same conditions. On the highway, the Prius gets about 50 MPG on level roads at about 60 MPH (the Jetta gets about 52 MPG under the same conditions). Given that I am pretty close to the EPA estimates in the Jetta and falling well short of them in the Prius, I feel I have reason to be disappointed.

It appears to me that the primary reason for the poor city mileage in my Prius is that it takes nearly 10 minutes of driving before the current mileage display begins to read over 50. That leaves me only about 5 minutes of driving with "good mileage" and that is not enough to make up for the first 10 minutes.

I wonder if there is some way to get the Prius to warm up faster? Are there any aftermarket gadgets that address this?

The irony in all this is that I planned to use the Prius for driving in town so that I could "save" the diesel for road trips. With the current differential between diesel and gas prices (diesel being about $.50/gal more), the Prius probably costs about the same to drive overall as the TDI, so I guess I shouldn't complain too much. It's just that I was expecting so much better.

It looks like what I really need is a full electric car for in town driving.

 

Seems like your problem is the short trips killing your mileage. There was a thread about people installing block heater to shorten their warmup cycle to improve mileage. You might want to look into that.

 

Try here on the block heater. http://priuschat.com/So-I-figured-out-how-...ter-t11176.html