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Tracking fuel efficiency in the Prime

Discussion in 'Gen 5 Prime Charging' started by Zyrian, Mar 21, 2024.

  1. Zyrian

    Zyrian Junior Member

    Joined:
    Feb 26, 2024
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    Location:
    ATL
    Vehicle:
    2023 Prius Prime
    Model:
    SE
    I have a feeling some folks buying these cars are as OCD/spreadsheet obsessed as me. I tracked gas mileage for all my cars for about 15 years (just recording mileage / fillups / building some graphs and calculating averages like cost per mile).

    Prime put a wrench into it because car's software is beyond useless to show any sort of useful info, and after 2 months all I could come up with is to add a sheet to track all charging sessions with estimated kWh used. I can't track EV only driving miles so I add cost of kWh to cost of fuel for each gas fillup and that gives me relatively accurate cents per mile driven.

    Anyone with other approaches / ideas / comments that this is waay silly and I should just enjoy the car?

    I fully realize that Prius efficiency by itself makes it one of the cheapest cars to drive in the universe, adding charging to it cuts it down any further, so the most expensive part is my time $/hr spent monkeying with spreadsheets :)
     
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  2. RandyPete

    RandyPete Member

    Joined:
    Apr 1, 2021
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    Location:
    Santa Margarita, CA, USA
    Vehicle:
    2024 Prius Prime
    Model:
    XSE
    Any examples of your spread sheets or graphs ?
     
  3. Mendel Leisk

    Mendel Leisk EGR Fanatic

    Joined:
    Oct 17, 2010
    56,664
    39,220
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    Location:
    Greater Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
    Vehicle:
    2010 Prius
    Model:
    Touring
    Your car being a plug-in, not sure how much of this is relevant, but some thoughts:

    1. At least until the advent of gen 5, Toyota cannot restrain themselves, from lying through their teeth about the mpg. With our gen 3 the fibs settle in around 7.11%, optimistic of course:

    upload_2024-3-21_11-33-42.png

    2. The only data I take from the car is the odometer reading at fill-up, well plus the the car displayed fuel economy (just for laughs). With the odo number, plus the gas pumped from the receipt, what more do you need:

    upload_2024-3-21_11-37-35.png

    (Uh oh, gotta fix that last date)
     
    RandyPete likes this.
  4. Zyrian

    Zyrian Junior Member

    Joined:
    Feb 26, 2024
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    Location:
    ATL
    Vehicle:
    2023 Prius Prime
    Model:
    SE
    Here's mine:
    upload_2024-3-21_15-16-19.png

    Only 2 real fill-ups, last line is my rolling estimate of the next one. kWh are sourced from a separate sheet that has full charge log, used to get them from Kill-A-Watt meter, now with L2 it's math based on OBD2 SoC % numbers adjusted with 10% estimated charge overhead, times my effective kWh cost with all the fees and taxes included.
    iMPG is what the car shows, MPG is math. cents/Mile is self-explanatory, the little weird number is the difference between MID MPG and math MPG (lies/optimism like in Mendel's post above).
    Values in bold I type in, the rest are formulas.
     
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