Would love to hear everyone's stories of how they first got into hypermiling and the Prius as well. I'll go first: I'm a technology guy and long before I've ever owned one I've always been impressed with the Prius. Every time we would pull up behind one or see one on the road I would always tell my wife how jealous I was of them. Of course this whole time I was pretty clueless to hypermiling and my driving of our other vehicles reflected this. Early in 2012 I really started to up my game with reading and researching the Prius. I'm pretty sure I even might have ran across PC here before I was a member. Then the time came for us to take a long road trip from Nebraska to North Carolina. Somewhere I had ran across the fact that some dealers rent Toyota's and even Prii. With our aging road trip vehicle I was leaning toward renting anyway and learning I could rent a Prius just pushed me over the edge. So off we went in our newly rented Prius. I still had no clue about P&G or really any other hypermiling techniques but through trial and error I was able to average upper 50's to low 60's for much of the trip. When we got home I honestly thought this might have been a fluke. So after much more research and really getting into PC a lot more I ran across things like Bob's video and other great threads on how to drive it. Needless to say it didn't take me long to realize I had to have one and the rest is history.
I was hypermiling with my Camry. 2002 4 cyl with manual, EPA rated 21/30. My best tank was 38MPG. Did a lot of coasting to a stop in neutral, and shutting the engine off at traffic lights. I had been eying a Prius since the GenII came out. When an uninsured driver totaled my Camry on Jun 12, 2012, that was my excuse to pick up a Prius. Four days later, on Jun 16, 2012, I had a brand new Prius Five in my garage. I went for the LED headlights, but fell in love with the AT package.
