5.4 litres per 100 km. I thought I would get the big question out of the way straight off. Everyone who asked me about the Prius had the same initial question: how good on gas is it? The answer is: pretty damn good. The last time I test drove the Prius was a few years ago, before gas was at even 80-cents a litre. Most people wrote off the car as a novelty for tree huggers and celebrities boasting from atop their soapboxes. Now, those same people (I am generalizing here), all of a sudden, are genuinely interested in what a hybrid like the Prius has to offer. Those who asked me about it wanted to know not only how much fuel it used, but how it was to live with. My response is that Prius offers everything you could ask for in a modern car, and it gets fantastic fuel mileage. However, its light thirst for fuel does come at a price premium. Full Article 2009 Toyota Prius - The Car Guide
The funny thing is that he says price premium and then mentiones $29,500. That's under the magical $30,000 mark. Granted a Camry LE starts at $23k and runs up to $25 or 26k and that would be the typical family car with obviously some stuff missing compared to the Prius. A Camry LE V6 here starts around $26k to $30k IIRC.
5.4 is pretty good, but probably reflects the constant go-pedal pressure of someone used to driving a car with just an ICE. It takes some time to learn to drive the car "properly". I know a lady with a Prius who hates the gas mileage she is getting, about 7.5 liters per hundred K. When questioned, she drives it for five minutes at a time, running errands close to home, so she will never see the benefit of the Hybrid system. I think the best way to show the payback for gas savings is to compare the Prius to your old car's consumption...for example, my Subaru Legacy GT used $3500 worth of gas at prices from two years ago per year, city driving. My Prius used $775 for the same driving this past year. The Subie cost $40k, the Prius $25k after rebates. When I apply the gas savings for the three years I expect to keep it, I calculate the real cost of the car will have declined to about $17k by the end of three years, not much more than I figure it will be worth on the used market at that time.
Boring to drive??? NO WAY! How can it be boring when you have the MFD to watch and your driving practices to monitor?
