MPG vs Time really the best gauge of avg MPG?

Hi cantgo...,

Yep, your right, and this was discussed a while ago. Its one of the things that Toyota missed our comments on, or did not implement for some reason.

 

In my TCH I used the 1 minute log as a current reminder of how I was doing. It was an easy visual to see if I was keeping my average up to where I thought I should be for that particular piece of road. I often would find myself with mu foot resting on the gas pedal and it was a reminder in the early days to lift it off

 

It would be nice if it broke it down as a Last 1 mile driven average, last 5 miles, 10, 20, 25 instead of the 5 minute bars.

 

Well put as I'd missed the earlier discussion:

There are a few time-based events, such as vehicle warm-up, that the time based graph has been useful. I also saw its use when after doing an extended EV by forcing the engine off seeing the impact of the traction battery recharge. The 1 and 5 minute graphs have some utility for monitoring time-based events but only as it applies to vehicle overall efficiency.

One of the tricks with my NHW11 and shared by the NHW20 exploits the 5-minute graph using the individual samples collected at speeds over 6 mph. If the earlier vehicle is kept below 6 mph for all but one sample, that single sample will be the reported MPG for the whole five minutes:

One of the Edmunds testers used this to play a trick on his co-workers. Something about becoming 'a mileage supreme diety.'

Welcome to the club. If you'd like to see some of the geekier Prius folks going back to 2001, take a look at the Yahoogroup, "Prius Technical Stuff." At least wander through the attached files and photos and message logs.

Bob Wilson

 

If anyone needed to visually average the graphed display to estimate average fuel consumption, they would also need the vertical axis to display GPM (or G/100Mi, or l/100km), rather than MPG.

But America overall is not sufficiently adept at math to use G/100Mi, so switching the horizontal axis from time to distance isn't going to work either.

 

The Prius method of displaying mpg over time is equally as valid as any other method. The question is whether it is useful to the average user. Most drivers won't understand what they are seeing, and will mentally weight each time slot the same. In an earlier thread we talked about a 3D display that showed mileage as a function of time and miles.

Tom

 

i think the one minute is better than the five minutes before, and i agree with the mathematical point about time vs distance

i had in the past thought of the possibility of the weighting to be displayed on the bar - such as the # of miles in that 5 minute segment, or perhaps a bar within the bar showing the "heft" of each segment. That kind of becomes non-op given the one minute segments, because at 60 MPHs you only get 1 mile, so many of the segments would be fractions of miles and it would maybe get too busy.

the ultimate would be MPGs in one mile segments as suggested above - this would totally cancel out the big fat zero you get from sitting in a jam (because you travelled zero miles and even though you used no gas zero over zero in this case is zero)