My wife bought her first Prius in 2005. We tend to forget, but there was a lot of hatred expressed toward that car, at that time. Which sounds hilarious now, but is true. There was also disinformation spread about that car, similar to the disinformation you’ll hear these days regarding electric vehicles. E.g., that the Prius had single-handedly ruined Sudbury, Ontario due to the need for nickel for the battery.
There was also a lot of just-plain-ordinary denial. That car got an EPA-rated 46 MPG, which, for the time, and the size of the car, was absolutely outstanding. This was a time when you could not find a traditional gas car with similar interior volume that broke 30 MPG.
It was, as I have noted before, alone in its level of efficiency. That’s expressed below by an index combining gas mileage and interior volume. (This is my calculation, from EPA mileage data.)
At that time, if you were willing to drive a small car, and required that it get at least a whopping 35 MPG overall, your choices were:
- Honda Insight (basically, a tiny 2-seater).
- Honda Civic Hybrid (as shown on the chart above).
- Three small VW models with 35 MPG turbo-diesels.
This per the federal website fueleconomy.gov.
And yet, I used to joke that my wife’s Prius single-handedly improved the gas mileage of the U.S. automobile fleet. Because, every time we mentioned 46 MPG, the universal response was, “Big deal, I get almost that good of a mileage in my fill-in-the-blank.” That Prius was the best thing that ever happened to the gas mileage of all of our friends’ cars.
The first year we owned that car, we heard about all kinds of mythical non-hybrid vehicles that easily got over 40 MPG. Easily. All the time. Without all that fancy hybrid nonsense.
In reality, none of these folks had a clue what they were talking about. None had actually carefully tracked mileage. Most had some impression of some road trip they once took where they think they got great mileage. Nobody was talking about city mileage. And so on.
But they all knew that hybrids were just so much hype.
As I continue to learn how to drive my wife’s 2021 Prius Prime for greatest fuel economy, I keep setting new personal bests. Most recently, we drove out to a local scenic byway (the Snickersville Turnpike) and back. Door-to-door, using “hybrid mode” (no energy from the grid), we managed to get 82.4 MPG over the course of the 80-mile round trip.
That was a mix of 55+ MPH urban arterial highways, country roads, and then small-town streets. So, no high-speed interstate driving.
Back in the day, people could fool themselves into thinking that their non-hybrid vehicle was just about as efficient as a Prius. Even though the U.S. EPA clearly said otherwise.
But this most recent generation of Prius, when driven with an eye toward best mileage (Post #1624), gets such eye-popping numbers that I don’t think you can kid yourself any more. This is now my second trip where I’ve ended around 80 MPG, driving the car in hybrid mode (i.e., not using energy from the grid.) Even our interstate trips now routinely yield high-60’s MPGs (admittedly, without the extreme speed limits present on Western interstates.)
And, separately, more than 70% of our miles are run purely on electricity from the grid. Which means the 65-to-80 MPG observed in hybrid mode is our version of gas-guzzling. In “EV mode”, using the battery and not the gas engine, we manage somewhere around what the EPA would term 150 MPGe.
This isn’t by way of bragging. It’s by way of setting the record straight about what’s routinely and reliably available these days. For not much money, as new car prices go.
I continue to read articles about how hard it is to move to electric transport, what a huge expense it entails, and so on. And, yeah, you can make it hard, and you can make it expensive, and inconvenient.
But none of that has to be true. Buy a quality plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV). If you’re like us, you’ll get most of the benefits of electrical transport and none of the drawbacks. Sure, you have to have some faith in the technology. You need to learn the do’s and don’t of taking care of that big battery. In a few areas, electricity is currently a more expensive fuel than gas, by a modest amount. But as far as I can tell, hybrids started out pretty good, and they just keep getting better.
I’m no longer satisfied when I only get 80 MPG, driving my wife’s hybrid. And I find that absolutely mind-blowing.
