Featured It turns out that Akio Toyoda was right

Ironically, I know I am on the other side of this. I knew I would take a mileage hit from the Prius, but winter weather conditions make the mileage hit seem larger. I do not think I have even hit the EPA rated mileage yet.

 

• Winter effects
  • higher air density - mitigate by driving slower
  • longer catalytic warm-up, typically a minute - akes longer in the cold and it cools off faster
  • tire rubber - flexing energy loss is highest until a couple of miles down the road
• Achieving EPA MPG speed - on a standard day on a closed loop, drive at 63 mph for at least 10-20 miles

Bob Wilson

 

We hit single digits - both ± zero ° & find tire pressures can easily drop from cold, some 5lbs psi. Keeping those babies pumped up to 40lbs driving on snow & ice helps maintain efficiency too.

 

A lot more if the tarrifs go in place. Hopefully The government will not go through with its plans to heavily tax avocados, or do a massive trade war on friendly countries that we import them from.

Plug in vehicles are growing, which reduces demand on oil. OPEC and Russia are losing pricing power because of them. we are at about our 20 year average price right now. If massive ev transition continue in china oil use should fall further, but that doesn't mean we won't have gas price shocks.

 

"Doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result."

Bob Wilson

 

It is colder here than in the deep South
I just had a really good drive, Here are a few more things

The dealer filled the car with 15% ethanol instead of 10% which gives better mileage. I usually get 10% ethanol Stations either say "contains ethanol" or "contains up to 10% ethanol" I usually go to a particular Exxon station,

the remaining appear to be different on my Gen 5 Camry than my Gen 5 Prius. It has a larger engine and other changes.

Toyota says it takes 600 miles for the engine to break in. The ECU needs to adjust to the exact engine parts and, I believe, the hybrid system needs to adjust too.
Now with temperature in the 50s and just under 1350 miles, the car now appears to start showing its good mileage.

Previously, I would struggle to occasionally get over 45 mpg. Today, on 2 trips, I easily got over 50.

 

..... wait, what? Unsure whether this post is saying MORE ethanol or less ethanol gives better mileage, but it is well established that ethanol decreases mileage - having only ⅔ the amount of energy .........

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

ie; more ethanol means less energy/mileage
.

 

Less ethanol (10%) is better mileage. Until the last few years that was all we had here then the President authorized 15% everywhere to drop fuel prices.The first time i fueled up at Walmart after that I noticed the drop in efficiency. I am not one to track each tank but it was still quite a noticeable drop.

 

I tried E15 a couple times in the 2016 Camry(not available at home). Fuel economy dropped, but to the E10 the price per mile remained the same. The higher octane may be an improvement for some cars.

 

For snow blower purposes, we have 5 gallons of Premium zero ethanol on hand. Reason being, that type of fuel survives much better over time, & tends to survive cold weather water condensation/accumulation. Nothing worse than having 11" snow on the morning driveway & sidewalks only to discover your fuel is contaminated with varnish formation & moisture.

.

 

I understand that some alcohol in gasoline can work to as an antifreeze (older people will remember the phenomenon of "fuel line freeze up") and may or may not make an engine run a bit cleaner depending on weather. People who build very sporty engines can make a lot of power with alcohol as a fuel. It has downsides in use too.

When viewed in terms of resource management, manufacturing petro fertilizers to grow corn on prime farmland to then distill into alcohol to burn in minivans and pick ups is nuts.

If the U S goes into the toothpick business!

 

Higher ethanol mighta been my issue. Displayed mpg has stayed stubbornly low too; I did a partial refill, and now just waiting till the tank’s down lowish along to flush the rest:

P0101 and P0127 codes showing | PriusChat

trouble codes at least have stayed gone, since dismissed.

 

Do either of Canada or BC require alcohol content disclosure on pumps?

 

So the early adopters of Prius here on PriusChat felt that hybrid was a short-term bridge to EV's. So we have 4 pages of comments....but the hybrid dreams of Toyota started with a wacky bulbous Prius (wonderful auto but not to everyone's tastes). So as successful as Prius was, it perhaps slowed down hybrid acceptance. Toyota kept saying they would make all models hybrids, but that took decades.

Even though say CamryHEV was 2006 it was stinky at first with no decent trunk and 33MPG (is why we somehow found the stomach to own a 2006 50 MPG Prius). RAV4HV similar story. Now WOW, the whole Toyota line-up is finally hybrid, and unbelievable MPG great hybrids. Suddenly people "get it" but it took decades to get the models people wanted.

 

We had a 2008, which was excellent, albeit a bit smaller trunk from our 05 Camry.
Averaged around 40 mpg

 

I'll defend the way Toyota went about this.

It isn't just that Toyota is now producing models that people want or that people suddenly get what they are about. I'm not confident that an average Sienna buyer knows exactly what a hybrid even is or that the Sienna is one. A prius buyer will know because that's part of the Prius identity.

25 years ago, the Prius was a weird little car at a not very low price that may not have had some of the wrinkles ironed out. I believe it had less than 100hp total. It made sense to market to a niche. Niche buyers will tolerate shortcomings that would generate rejection in a general audience. Slow, weird and expensive is a tough thing to sell to a general audience.

Back then, there were some cars that were inexpensive and interesting. You could get an Integra, an efficient fast and fun car for about the same price, or a VW Golf for less, or a Suzuki sedan for about half the price of a Prius. VW and Mazda make or recently made credible inexpensive versions of the Jetta and Mazda3; I wish you luck finding one. All those good, cheap fun cars are effectively gone now.

So Toyota has a tested system with engine and electrical components set up to get a vehicle to 60 in 7 or 8 seconds, and a reputation for reliability, and the rest of the market has been driven from cheery and cheap to complex, isolated and expensive, but without Toyota's track record.

Toyota's hybrid products became more acceptable and desirable, while a lot of the competition became less desirable or just left the field.

 

Perhaps akio Toyota knew that trump would try to kill evs

 

Or that there was exactly no chance that government mandates and targets would drive consumers to EVs in the numbers some hoped, no matter the president.

 

Not all of us. I was an early adopter (a 2004 Prius). My goal was to enjoy the technology and about 46 MPG on average. I was not thinking about EVs as they were not practical in my automotive use at that time (and perhaps still not practical for me).

JeffD

 

People would have so much more time left for interesting conversations if we just stopped talking about efficiency with fuel volume in the denominator and just put amount of energy there instead.

There is total precedent for this, even in the US. My home natural gas bill every month arrives with the raw meter reading (in cubic feet) converted to therms, using the gas's energy content in therms per cubic foot, which can vary from month to month depending on where the utility is buying the gas. The price I pay is stated as how much per therm, not how much per cubic foot.

A therm is one of the more obscure energy units, something like 10^5 BTU, or ~ 105.5 megajoule, or 29.3 kilowatt-hour. That makes it pretty close to a 33.7 kWh gallon o' gas. 50 MPG would be about 43.5 mile/therm, or 0.412 mile/megajoule, or 1.48 mile/kWh.

If gas pumps worked like the gas utility, and showed you amount of energy you had just pumped into your tank instead of just the physical volume, and showed a price per unit of energy, people might do a lot less thinking in circles on the subject. You'd find that you can't fit as much energy into your tank as E15 as you can with E10 or E0, but it would stop seeming as if the car's efficiency was changing.

(Or, if the different formulations did turn out to have some actual effect on the car's efficiency—now too tiny to notice when swamped by the difference in energy per volume—it would become much more possible to talk about that.)