Sunday, May 08, 2011

Going Green Update


Short of me getting into a completely different line of work and abandoning my company, I'm going to drive a lot of miles. Undesirable, but unavoidable at least for now. So, to make the best of it, we finally got a Prius today. 90% of my driving is city driving at about 40 - 45 mph and that is in the sweet spot of a Prius. At this speed and slower, it primarily runs as an electric car and thus gets some crazy good gas mileage. Our Hyundai that we traded in (may it rest in peace ... 186,000 miles) got pretty good gas mileage, about 30 in the city. With the Prius, I'm hoping to double that. I'll report back here after a month or so with my results. One of the nice things about the Prius is the on-screen readouts that report whether you are running from the gas engine or electric, or both and what your current MPG is. It's very easy to see how your driving habits, the road conditions, and even having the A/C on can affect the gas mileage. So count on me trying some "hypermileage" techniques.

5 comments:

CyberKitten said...

I look forward to seeing how things work out for you.

wstachour said...

I've test driven one and was amazed at Toyota's accomplishment in virtually hiding the technology from the experience. YOu can immerse yourself in things to maximize your efficiency, but you can also just drive it like any car and be quite unaware that anything is afoot. That's a real accomplishment, given how complex and new the technology was when it was introduced.

I'll look forward to ongoing reports of your experiences.

dbackdad said...

Wunelle -- Yeah, I agree. You could completely ignore the tech of it and would still have a roomy cool car that gets great gas mileage. But it's also nice how it make the tech accessible and fun for those that want to understand how it works and how you can tweak it.

Sadie Lou said...

Hey Lance, just wrote a music review might be interested in.
http://craftilyeverafter.blogspot.com/2011/05/chris-robinson-brotherhood_17.html

dbackdad said...

Sadie, have you seen any decent movies lately? We just saw Thor this last weekend and I'm working on a review that I'll post here in a day or so.