have you run out of gas in your prius?

Fun story.

I'm curious as to why you didn't just walk the four blocks back up the ramp to the Hinsdale Oasis ( 41.783985071869395,-87.90708303451538 ) when the car "kicked and started slowing down" ( 41.796056068633796,-87.90810227394104 ). I assume you just wanted to see how far you could get on battery?

I'm also curious why you didn't exit at Ogden Ave ( 41.818782008320696,-87.9141452908516 ) and get gas at the Shell ( 41.81638523885823,-87.92494654655457 ) or the BP ( 41.816665099801114,-87.92631983757019 ). Again I assume that since it was still running on battery, you must just have been curious as to how far you'd get.

I'm really surprised, after the car shut off on you once, just before the toll ( 41.85329233505722,-87.91890621185303 ), that you made it as far as you did ( 41.93979697591854,-87.89781332015991 ). I wonder what made the first shutoff come so early, and why restarting allowed access to so much more battery.

After the car came to a stop the first time ( 41.85329233505722,-87.91890621185303 ), if I got it started again, I definitely would have exited at Roosevelt ( 41.86224611104738,-87.91818737983704 ) to look for gas ( 41.86296124033902,-87.90174007415771 ). You sure were determined to see how far that battery would carry you.

I'm glad to hear that you managed to walk safely to the O'Hare Oasis ( 41.950593837682646,-87.88187026977539 ) once it wouldn't start anymore.

I've included GPS coordinates that can be pasted into the search box on google maps for those who are curious as to the locations of some of the things mentioned. If you use the "satellite" image setting in google maps you can see that this was certainly not all down hill. I'd describe it as mostly flat, with frequent small climbs over (or out from under) various overpasses (underpasses).

While wind in this region predominately blows out of the west, it can vary with local weather conditions. I assume on this day there must have been quite a strong wind (this is the "Windy City" you know) out of the south.

All in all, I doubt the veracity of the story. On the other hand, the distances over road and the locations described certainly match the map. You'd have to have your mind pretty well set on running your battery all the way down to pass up so many exits.

 

Never run out of gas myself but curious of those who have what is the furthest you've made it on battery alone

I have one friend who says you can go 40 miles on it. I dont believe him.

 

I think it's going to depend quite a bit on topography, wind and weather conditions, temperature, time of day.

I suppose if you could find a 40 mile long gentle incline and arrange to run out of gas at the top just before heading down, you wouldn't have too much trouble getting 40 miles after you ran out. On the other hand, if you run out at the bottom just before heading up, forget it. A nice tailwind will help quite a bit too.

 

cvstan - find an excuse to take a 50-100 mile freeway trip on level ground with minimal interruptions (i.e. mostly freeway, with few or no stops). Before you do, fill up the tank and fill up your tires as far as you safely can.

Once you're on the highway hit 59 mph, set cruise control, turn off the AC and all other stuff (make sure the windows are up), and reset the meter on the MFD.

That's the easiest and most guaranteed way I can think of to see mileage way above 51 without having to ask you a bunch of specific questions.

~ dan ~

 

The bladder is there to prevent gasoline from evaporating into the atmosphere. That's how it gets the AT-PZEV rating, in part. The bladder makes the tank capacity variable. Live with it.

You Australians clearly don't understand the American's macho need to prove that his force of mind is more powerful than the mathematics of zero (as in, no more gas in the tank.)

Different people have different experiences with capacity. I used to wait for the blinking pip to fill, and generally got from 6.5 to 7.5 gallons in. Between the unknown and unknowable reserve, and the bladder, that's not too far out of normal. I have, on occasion, gotten 8.5 gallons in. Never more than that. I no longer try to drive as far as I can. I more or less take the above advice. At 2 bars I fill up if convenient. At one bar I fill up at the next station. At the blinking pip I fill up NOW.

Do not rely on these or any other such numbers. Experience has shown that each individual Prius is unique. You may get 40 miles, you may get one mile, after the last pip starts to blink. The gas tank bladder changes everything you thought you knew about gas tanks. It can change from one day to the next, and is definitely different from one car to another. The "tank" may be 11.9 gallons without the bladder, but the bladder's capacity is not 11.9 gallons. Just remember that you have a small tank and it's not that big a deal.

I've never run out of gas. But in neighborhood driving (slow speeds, a stop sign every 2 to 4 bocks) one bar on the battery is good for about 1/4 mile. In normal use, that translates to about 1 1/2 miles on EV, from a "full" battery icon to where EV cuts out.

The icon actually represents a little less than half the battery's actual capacity, but the battery never goes over 80%. If you're on the highway when you run out of gas, you're likely to be at around 60% SOC. So two to three miles on battery alone would be stretching it.

If you manage to deplete the battery enough that it cannot start the engine, you are in for an extremely expensive repair. It would be far wiser to call for help than to keep driving. Some folks have driven some impressive distance without damaging their car. Others have not been so fortunate.

 

on the mfd it displays every 50 Wh of energy regenerated, is this the value one bar represents?

 

OK, I’ll admit it. I’ve run out of gas in the Prius. But it wasn’t my fault. The ’05 and ’06 Prius are totally different.

In the ’05 Prius, the MFD resets after every fillup. In the ’06 it is cumulative. So when I thought I was getting 55 mpg on the tank, I really had no idea of the real mpg.

In the ’05 Prius, you can drive far on the blinking pip. I’ve heard of over 50 miles. In the ’06 you can drive 24 miles, and no more.

So there I was, sitting at the light with no gas and two small children in the back seat. OK, I won’t panic. Too bad that station 500 feet down the road had shut down several months earlier. I knew there was one a bit further up the road.

I looked at the battery guage and started to sweat. It was four bars. That isn’t good. We started down the road as gently as possible. I couldn’t believe the rate the bars were dropping. We were down to one bar and weren’t even within sight of the station. I knew the battery had more in it even at one bar, and would have kept going. The ’06 Prius decided it wouldn’t, and shifted into N. We then coasted to the side of the road, with some jerky lady getting the chance to blow her horn at us. Yes, we shifted her life by almost two seconds getting off the road.

I then had to make the dredded call to father-in-law Curtis. The conversation went something like, “Yes, I’ve run the car out of gas. Yes, your two beloved grandchildren are in the car. Yes, it is about 95 degrees outside. Yes, those are cars you hear whizzing by at about 40 mph.” I then also had to explain to him that he couldn’t just bring his gas can, he had to bring the big 5-gallon can because I needed at least 3 gallons so the car would understand that gas had been added to the tank. Why it doesn’t know when you add even a tenth of gallon to the tank I don’t understand, every other car will start up again. So I had to do the three on-off cycles, and then the car was fine.

So no, I didn’t go 40 or 50 miles on the battery. That is physically impossible. I don’t think I went even 0.40 or 0.50 miles on the battery. And I would have made it the last 0.75 miles if I had started off at 7 bars.

The only other time I ran out of gas was in a ’72 Pontiac Catalina 400. I was taking a guy to the airport 12 miles away. We were starting off on empty. There was only one gas station the entire route, about 9 miles away. After 8.5 miles the car sputtered to a stop. With some quick running we got some gas and made it to the airport on time. Running out a couple miles earlier and it would have been a disaster.

OK, then there was the time I really didn't run out gas but ended up in the ditch anyway. On the truck there were two tanks, and I ran the first one dry. So I was desperately trying to switch to the second tank, the road was a bit icy, and I ended up gently sliding into the ditch. But I wasn't out of gas.

 

First things first Danny, this did happen exactly the way it was described. It happened in the summer. I would not have walked in the winter i would have called my motor club. the reason it ran out so fast is that i just took off. If it were to ever happen again i would drive about 25mph to get farther on the battery. And the reason i didnt get off the hyway and go looking for a gas station is for the exact reason of not wanting to go looking ! i was not familiar with the get offs and i figured if i was going to get stranded i would be better off on the hyway than some side street at 2 am.

 

Here is the thing I think is making people run out of petrol.
Everyone thinks you can do 60 miles(100km) on the last bar. This may be the case but only if you see the second last bar go out and only if you are getting 600 miles(1000km) from a tank.

You see, if you look at the fuel gauge and there are 2 bars left out of ten, you know you have 1/10th of a tank and some petrol left. If you then look at the gauge some distance later and there is only one bar remaining you know you have LESS than 1/10th of a tank left.
If you normally get less than 600 miles(1000km) from a fill up then you can't do 60 miles(100km) on the last bar even if you see the second last bar go out. If you don't see you are down to one bar until the last bar flashes, you might be in trouble soon so get fuel.

I don't know about your Prius but I know I can go over 200km(120 miles) before the first bar goes out on my gauge. This tells me I must have used more than 2/10ths of a tank of fuel because the most I have got from a tank of petrol is 960km and 200 is more than 2/10ths of 960. So if my first bar on my gauge is about 200km then I know I have less than 760km left in my tank and 9 bars left. I can deduce from this that on average each bar is equivalent to about 84km however if the first bar is anything to go by the gauge isn't linear but each bar represents a smaller amount of fuel than the bar to its right.

Going by this logic I would assume the last bar on the gauge represents LESS than say 60km(37 miles) of fuel and I can only know that I have around that range from the last time I saw 2 bars on the gauge not from the first time I notice there is only one bar because I would have no idea how long ago the second last bar went off.

This is why I start looking for petrol when I have 2 bars on the fuel gauge and if I have 1 bar, fuel becomes a top priority.

 

Pat, you think this way because you understand numbers, and are accustomed to thinking logically and applying simple math to your daily life.

Here in this great land of America, the vast majority of the population is innumerate. (Like illiterate, but with numbers.) They do not perform the kind of analysis you described because they simply do not know how. Most Americans have real difficulty answering the following question: "If you are on a plane traveling 560 miles per hour, how far do you go in an hour?" I kid you not. They don't know how to approach it.

FWIW, my "guess gauge" seems fairly linear after the first pip. But these gauges are notoriously inconsistent. It appears possible, even likely, to have two gauges in the same year Prius that behave very differently.

But pretty much everyone reports going farther on the first pip, leaving less gas for the other pips.

It would be nice to have a "miles remaining" indicator, but people would complain about its not being exact.

 

a miles remaining is probably the first thing I noticed I missed from other cars in my prius

 

Running out of gas in ANY car is just plain stupid!!!!!!

 

TELL me about it. I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to be able to survive teaching mathematics here in the trenches (underrepresented high school); the pervasiveness of elective ignorance kills my morale daily, like a horrible poison that slowly saps the life force out of me. I'm --> <-- this close to applying for a tenure track position at a university.

And the sad, sad part of this is for so many youths today, the general (and easily understood) nature of the behavior of numbers is just so lost from the new generations that I can feel confident I'll always have a job (it's a bad thing that competition for skilled jobs will be few and far between in the US, even though it's a good thing for my employment status).

Sadly,

~ dan ~

Two major causes:
(1) Poor people with "street values" are breeding three generations for every two generations of the rest of us. So kids are often raised by MTV with no guidance in forming their value systems in early life. The current modern value system shuns any expression of academic skills, so even young people who are innately talented tend to avoid letting themselves flourish.
(2) The decline of language. English is too flexible, which means you can butcher it while speaking, but still get your point across. The structure and constructs of language are mathematic processes, and the general fall of the language proper contributes a LOT to this lack of logical thought.

These are the topics of two of my essays.

 

It's not just the poor and underprivileged. Plenty (probably the majority) of middle-class people maintain a hatred of numbers and math. They get angry when you suggest they learn some math. They insist it has no real use for them. They block out from their minds, not only the multitudinous ways that numeracy would help them live better lives, but also the ways in which a mathematical education would allow them to think more clearly in making decisions in everyday life.

Of course, politicians don't want people to be able to think clearly, because a well-educated populace would vote them ALL out of office.

 

This is true. I wasn't trying to say that's -all- of the problem; it's a major source though. And you're absolutely right about the fact that 100% of politicians are crooks

The sad part is the fact that what we today call "Calculus I" is the minimum knowledge of mathematics that anyone uses in their daily life, and yet so many people are oblivious to this fact or refuse its possibility.

 

I have run out of gas with 4 out of 7 cars that I have owned. When the fuel bar gets to one line, I'm at the gas station. This little guy just doesn't want to take a chance any more.

 

Three weeks ago I risked it and drove on the highway in heavy traffic where a possible accident would have meant I run out for 5-6 miles with the flashing pip. My MPG was about 48 for that trip.

I might be repeating that trip tomorrow

 

I never ran out of gas in any car. But I did come damn close in my Prius just because I was trying to push it a little farther. According to my Can-View I was running on %0 for a few miles. Thats as close as I ever want to get to running out of gas in my Prius.

 

I try not to tempt fate (and the inaccurate "guess" gage), especially now that I have a baby in the car with me 80% of the time. The closest I ever got was one day when I still had 2 bars left (the 3rd one had dropped off the night before as I was arriving home). I assumed I had plenty of gas for a quick 10 mile trip when 3 miles into said trip, I got the low fuel warning on my dash & mfd. Lo & behold I was suddenly down to 1 bar and in a cold sweat as I took the next offramp to the nearest gas station.

 

Interesting. My '06 Prius, the avg-mpg is cumulative, but the miles reset in one car length of the pump, whether I go forward or backward. Both reset whenever I press the reset button.