Author:
mn
<
kml
>
75.151.131.97
Use
this link
if you want to link to this message and its entire thread of discussion.
Date:
4/9/2009 10:29:32 AM
Subject:
RE: Madcows (and other motor heads)
Yeah, I have a prius, or my wife does rather. The actual MPG over the almost two years she has had it is currently 44 MPG. She puts maybe 15k miles per year on the car, which is above the 12k/year national average. I have rented a few cars from a car sharing service in my city, and the next best actual milage I have personally seen is in a mini cooper with about 32.
The 70 mpg is for special cases, but it is not just coasting for 30 seconds down a hill. The prius has a time-series graph (aka MPG porn) which breaks down milage at 5 min intervals over perhaps an hour.
The prius is not some savior of the human race, and it can't compete with a tesla in almost any department except reliability, but it has no real tradeoffs, excepting the 100k battery life. When my wife was looking at them, a total battery array replacement was about 1500$, and they are warranted for 100k by Toyota. If a battery goes, though, you don't need to replace the whole array.
Perhaps I mistakenly used torque when I meant something else, but I was talking about my father's jetta TDI, which as I mentioned twice earlier in this thread was underwhelming. Neither of the two are dragsters. He is contemplating a prius because his jetta is getting old and the prius has better pull than his tdi.
I think it is a good thing for diesel cars to be put back into the market, and a hybrid diesel really makes a lot of sense. The one drawback I can see is having to maintain a specific operating temperature especially in the emissions components. Since hybrids are constantly switching off and on the gas engine, sometimes in colder weather esp., they have to run the motor just to bring things up to temp.
