Prius not for "little old ladies"?

Definitely a less efficient engine, with a quite different efficiency curve, not nearly as bad as your CJ. I would do a little better than epa and that was the old epa, in the prius I do 15%-20% worse. I have many short trips. You can think of it this way, if I hopped on the highway to go 2 miles, the v8 would warm in 10 seconds then be at its efficient best. The hills would not phase it at all. The prius is going through some warm up dance and seems to not want to move. On a long highway drive the lexus and prius will both beat their epa, but I'll get 53 in the prius and I would get 29 in the lexus. In a 10 mph 8 mile city drive with lights the lexus would drop to around 14mpg and the prius is very happy.

This is probably about right. That efficient engine doesn't produce the waste heat that a less efficient one would. There also seems to be a strange dance with its emissions warm up that gives it more of a penalty trying to get torque out on hills before its warm.

 

Gen 3 has a exhaust heat exchanger to also bring up the temperature of the coolant faster. Perhaps the total fuel consumption required to reach operating temperature is lower than conventional engines.

 

That's what I thought before I bought the car. Seriously maybe there is something wrong with my car, and its different, but the old prius hands like ken from japan and bob Wilson seem to think my poor short trip mileage is just about the car and conditions. Let the new owners and potential buyers know its there so they aren't surprised like I was.

The EGR which is part of that heat exchange system which should improve fuel economy and reduces NOx at lower power ranges of the car.

 

Nevertheless, only with a lot of study should we get to a conclusion. The total travel during "heating" process is not really made by the engine in our Prius. Quite the contrary, in a tradicional car, throttle is governing ICE load to move the car, which in itself is A/F ratio corrected for low temperature operation and fuel efficiency at low speeds is awfully bad. Environmentally speaking, the "tradicional" is much worse due to a cat pot not heated properly during the first stages.

 

My Prius drops easily to around 40 MPG during the winter if all I'm doing is taking the kids to school, dance, band, gymnastics, church etc., which are all very short, as most are just a couple miles, with one being maybe 4 miles. My Odyssey doing the same thing is around 10-12 MPG, so I'm very happy with the Prius' "low" mileage under these conditions.

 

Im not quite sure how to define little old laddies. My mom is 5'2" is that little? She has a 15 yo accord with 44,000 miles on it. Only takes short trips, if she is going somewhere far, my dad or someone else drives. My aunt is 5'10" so not as little but she also drives short trips and less than 5K miles a year. Both of them seem to dislike technology. If we think my dad should have a gadget we buy it as a present to not cause a fight with mom. I think mom uses less than 100 gallons of gasoline a year now that she is retired. Prius would be an awful car for her, with the strange noises and all the buttons. She used to drive us around in an mg convertable when I was a little kid, so much for needing a minivan. If the Honda ever dies and her reaction times are good, I think a miata would be a good car for her.

So my group is drives less than 7000 miles a year of mainly short trips and doesn't like technology, unlikely to want to learn how to drive differently. If you have a different group in mind it may be why there is disagreement.

One thing we can probably agree on is there should be a standard short milage test. I find the middle part full of globally gook. I do much worse visa vis the epa tests in the prius in spite of driving it less aggressively and slower. If the prius and my old lexus both charge the same startup tax, and if this is high relative to the other gas used, it rapidly closes the efficiency gap. On the environmental side I have no idea, but severe doubts. I think it likely has more to do with california politics and an idle test than any real world polution savings. Here I would need to see what the polutant change would be.

at least anouther point of sanity that my car is not an outlier. My biggest hit is in our hot summer where ac messes with the SOC, and something in the "warm up" severly eats power to climb hills or accellerate to freeway speeds. On the other hand why do you own an odyssey if you care about mileage?

 

We've had the Odyssey for 10 years, which was bought at a time when I was less concerned with gas consumption. It has been used in recent years to participate in a neighborhood carpool for the kids going to school. When it has to be replaced, the school situation will be different and I'd like to replace it with another Prius but that won't happen unless the seats are much improved, per my wife. All of my gas savings PLUS have gone to medical bills for my wife's back pain problems that started literally the day after our first long road trip. No proof the Prius seats caused it but it is suspicious. Personally, I have no problem with the seats.

 

I've read some comments about the leather upgrade seats being more comfortable. Have you /she checked them

 

My wife has had back pain for many years. We bought $10 lumber supports (from Bed Bath and Beyond) that strap over the seat and that made the seats more comfortable for her. But she found the Prius driver's seat more comfortable than her Civic LX anyway. She finds the passenger seat less comfortable because it's lower than the driver's seat.

Her problem now with the seats is a sore nice person. She got very uncomfortable on a long drive over the summer (600 miles over two days). So now we need to find good seat cushions.

 

My wife also has a pain in her nice person. At first we thought it was the seats, but now she realizes that it's nothing more than being married to me.

Tom

 

You should be able to do better than that, at least in the summer. Check the threads on driving techniques that improve MPG.

 

Prius is fine for 'little old ladies'. My M-I-L is 77 and my F-I-L is 85. Their 2010 Prius is driven anywhere from a mile to 50 at a time. Unless they both have to go somewhere, the '97 Subaru Legacy sits in the driveway.

Yes, if all you drive is short 1 or 2 mile trips, the MPG won't be stellar. But it will still beat the pants off any other non EV car.

For short trips, I wonder if the Gen II thermos wasn't a better device than the Gen III heat return. Instantaneous heated coolant vs recovery from an engine that is heating up. I would think this is especially true in the winter when it is 0F if you go somewhere, stop for a couple of hours, then get back on the road.

 

Thanks for the input on solutions for the back pain my wife has. She has tried a number of devices but she says nothing makes the Prius seats as comfortable as the Odyssey seats. I will pass the additional info on to her.