Here’s why we love our new Prius, purchased several months ago after the transmission in our VW Jetta diesel wagon ate itself alive. Careful attention to what the Prius likes can extend effective mileage quite a bit. I’m getting better at it, at least when I’m paying attention rather than just driving.
This was the report from the Prius internal computer system after driving back to Kaaawa from a shopping trip to Kaneohe. It took 32 minutes to drive the 14.3 miles.
And I was able to get 81 mpg by careful driving! I think that’s my best trip so far.
Of course, overall mileage isn’t anywhere near as good. Mileage goes way down during the trip through the tunnel to town, and you can quickly see the mileage drop if your foot is unnecessarily heavy. Still, we’ve been averaging 55-57 mpg with each tank of gas.
And if you would like to talk to a great, no pressure salesman at Windward Toyota, I’d be glad to pass his name along.
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What do you think of the new requirement to make electric cars noisier?
I think it’s a good idea in general, although I haven’t seen the actual proposed rules. We worry about our cats, since the car makes so little noise.
Get license plate “57 MPG.”
I think the idea is great, but I sure hate following behind (most of) them – especially up the Pali. All that “going light on the pedal” makes for too many”below the legal speed limit” drivers!
That’s why god made horns on cars. Driving slower than the other traffic is dangerous. Get over your ridiculous Hawaii driving hangups and blast ’em loud and hard.
@anonymous. 🙄
Unlike you, I’d rather not make an a#$ out of myself, thanks. I do go around them at the first opportunity.
I know I will get the virtual horn blast for this view but it is a speed LIMIT not a speed MANDATE. So, if I am going a reasonable speed and you give me the horn as you speed past at LIMIT plus 20, I will give you the one finger acknowledgement and be thankful that I have another idiot off my tail. Also, if other traffic is exceeding the LIMIT, I do not feel obligated to do the same “to be safe”
Thanks for saying that. I feel the same way as those road rage warriors freak out at being stuck behind someone only going the speed limit.
One major cultural change that would reduce the road rage is for the cars going slower to move as far right as reasonable so that faster cars can pass.
In Germany, this is just automatic, especially on the autobahn, with the result that those who want to go fast can do so because the slower cars are always moving to the right to get out of their way at the first opportunity.
Here, the belief seems to be that if you are going the speed limit, you have the right to be in the left most lane, even when cars are passing you on the right.
Implicit in your comment is that you have the right to exceed the speed limit. You don’t. Your comparison with Germany is nonsensical because the autobahn has no speed limit. Here we do. Live with it or start packing your bags and dust off that German – English dictionary.
How old was that Jetta, may I ask?
I’ve heard that the best thing for the environment is not necessarily to buy an electric car or a hybrid (especially if the electricity used to charge an electric car comes from coal). The best thing for the environment is to get a dependable, reasonably priced and relatively fuel-efficient car and run that baby into the ground. So you did good for the planet in doing just that.
It takes natural resources to build a car. It’s better for the environment, therefore, to get a smaller car. Those smaller cars, happily, tend to last longer because they have less that can go wrong with them. Supposedly, Corolla is the most reliable among traditional internal-combustion cars, along with the other compact four-cylinder Toyotas like Yaris. But Prius is the single most reliable car for this reason, because it has fewer moving parts, in a way.
http://money.cnn.com/gallery/autos/2012/10/29/consumer-reports-most-reliable-cars/index.html
“The small Toyota Prius C is, in fact, the most dependable car of all, according to Consumer Reports. While that’s good news for Toyota, the ranking doesn’t mean Consumer Reports’ car testers are recommending it. Despite being dependable, the magazine just doesn’t think it’s a very good car.”
Don’t listen to the haters, man. Forget Consumer Reports. Don’t mind those jerks honking behind you on the Pali. The Prius is good for Mother Earth and good your own personal finances. In a few years, they’ll be hitchhiking and you’ll be the one passing them on the road.
Which Prius did you get?
Seems like this discussion has degenerated into one of my favorite gripes-go fast or go slow. I have a ’93 Toyota pickup that I manage to get 22+ mpg out of. I always hang to the ring lane and still get tailgated at the speed limit to 5 over. I say screw em. Petulant little kids who want their way. Used to be (back when I was very young), 5 over was accepted. Now it’s like the speed limit is a suggested minimum and the sky’s the limit. Oh well, I guess that’s what one gets for becoming old and stogy.
To address the noise issue — one of the things we LOVE about our Prius is how quiet it is. I really dislike riding in conventional cars now because of the noise. So I’m one that is disappointed in the idea that we have to add noise to these cars — I think one of the selling points is that they reduce noise pollution as well as air pollution!
OK,OK, Gant is right. The discussion has drifted from fuel economy, so let’s get back to that. Department of Energy studies, (fueleconomy.gov) indicate that the average car reaches maximum fuel efficiency at around 50 to 55 MPH. But that MPG decreases rapidly from there; about -3% at 60 and about -17% at 70 MPH. They suggest that for every 5 MPH over 50 MPH is like paying an additional $.23 per gallon at the pump. At 70 MPH that is $.92 per gallon more. So, the easiest way to maximize fuel efficiency is to drive at a speed of around 50 to 55 MPH. All of the impatient lead-footed geniuses out there who are shopping gas stations to save $.05 per gallon and then firing it up to 70 on the freeway are sweeping up crumbs from underneath the table while throwing filet mignon out the back door.
Your interaction with the mileage gauge is an example of ‘gamification’.
Other articles on this topic point out how the Volt is attractive to techies, not to greenies because of this deliberate gamification.
This might be a big generational shift, from drivers who are more interested in the inside of the car than the outer appearance. They don’t particularly care what others on the road think of them. That doesn’t mean that they are so involved in technology that they don’t have an audience; they post their activities online.
This might constitute a great generational divide, although I am not sure along which lines. One historical schema, from the 1950s book “The Lonely Crowd”, posits a couple of great cultural shifts in the West. With the rise of Protestantism especially, there is a shift from a tradition-oriented society to an inward-oriented society; in the 20th century, there is another shift, toward an other-directed society. What might exist with the gamification of cars might be described as an other-directed society mediated by game technology. (Again, gamification is not an inward shift.)
One might expect younger people and educated people to get into this. But not in all places. To resurrect the ghost of Richard Florida, the gamification of real life might be a city thing, or even a suburb thing … but it’s not a small-town, red state thing. By this reckoning, half the US would be disinterested in gamification. For example, the suburban and urban middle class did grow wary and disenchanted with SUVs back in 2008 when the price of oil rose, but small town workers still love their gigantic trucks. They still live in the 1980s.
And most of ‘urban’ Honolulu, not to mention most of Oahu or Hawaii, might fit in this category as culturally non-urban. After all, Kapolei is supposed to be the ‘Second City’, but it is not yet urban (if it ever will be). And Governor Abercrombie speaks of the area between Diamond Head and Kalihi as a future ‘Third City’. But where in the world is the ‘First City’? Moreover, even the urban areas like downtown have a certain provincial flavor (at least to me).
So what we might have in Honolulu is not quite the kind of urban, high-tech, creative society glorified by Richard Florida. Young people in Honolulu generally might not be interested in this the way they are in northern California. It might be something restricted instead to older, more educated citizens.
There might be some evidence of this in a recent Civil Beat article on the popularity of Abercrobie’s choice of Schatz as Inouye’s replacement.
http://www.civilbeat.com/articles/2013/01/14/18076-civil-beat-poll-did-abercrombie-make-the-right-choice-for-senator/
The interviewee from the polling company noted correctly that there is a gulf generationally and culturally between Inouye and Schatz.
But he failed to explain why it is older, educated voters who favor the younger Schatz, and younger, less educated voters who favor the older Hanabusa. It is blatantly counterintuitive. In fact, it’s a paradox. (Also, local voters who favor Obama also favor Hanabusa, even though Schatz is very much an Obama man; moreover, Inouye initially supported Hillary Clinton, the establishment figure, against Obama.)
Of course, much of Schatz’s support probably comes from old rich white Republicans who imagine Schatz to be conservative. But Schatz does not seem conservative. What they might like, though, is that Schatz might seem more independent than Hanabusa from the dominant Inouye faction of the local Democratic Party, or the whole Party. But that’s unusual, because conservatives usually don’t even trust potentially independent people in their own party (e.g., Republicans in California never trusted Arnold Schwarzenegger); but, perhaps they might like it when an independent in the other camp rises in power. Nevertheless, in places like California, it is young people who gravitate toward seemingly independent candidates (e.g., the election of Jesse Ventura to the Minnesota governorship in 1999).
I think that Hawaii might be unique in its relatively minimal generation gap. For instance, Asian American literature is all about a cultural gulf between the generations (e.g., the Joy Luck Club). But local literature in Hawaii seems more about continuity (often, dysfunctional continuity). People everywhere tend to vote how their parents vote, it’s the greatest determiner of voting patterns. But it could be that here, young people really don’t rebel in their voting habits the way they do elsewhere.
The real gulf in Hawaii might be in terms of education. In the 1950s and 1960s in Hawaii, the older generation would probably have tended to be less educated than the younger generation. But that’s probably reversed now. That is, young, educated people in the past might have had great inhibitions against moving to the continental US a couple of generations ago, but now the mainland probably has a strong pull, rather than a sort of repulsiveness, for those kind of people. So it might be more educated people in Hawaii who question the status quo, and today they happen to be older. (The more educated people of an earlier generation, like Dan Inouye, were younger and they challenged the then-status quo, but they became part of a later status quo.)
If this is generally true, then Richard Florida’s formula of economic development through fashionable urbanization won’t quite apply to Honolulu. Notably, it could be the more mature, educated citizens out on the North Shore who are most into technology, gamifying their Prius, rather than young hipsters in town. There really is no town in Honolulu, at least not as R. Florida thinks of it.