A Stock Prius just drove across America averaging 93.158 MPG | Hacker News Reader

A Stock Prius just drove across America averaging 93.158 MPG

theautopian.com

35 pointsRickJWagner32 comments

Personally, my next vehicle will be a plug-in hybrid, likely a used Prius.

For all the benefits of EVs, they are a hassle today and will likely continue to be a hassle for the lifetime of a vehicle purchased today.

My current vehicle, a four door sedan, averages approximately 6 l / 100 km. Pretty good but that is largely because it is light.

IMHO, there's a huge part of the hybrid / dual drivetrain story that EV advocates miss - eliminating most (but not all) fuel emissions is a very good start and is certainly better than the status quo. Hybrids also come with the benefits of both fuels, an advantage that is often ignored.

A 2023 Prius prime has about 60 km of electric range. This is well above the average commute length in Canada.

What benefits do you see hybrids having over EVs? Is it just range anxiety? If so, check out how quickly some of the 800V architecture cars can change. I think the Kia EV6 can charge from 10-90% in 18 minutes, and that's for almost 300 miles of range.

I don't know about you, but if I charged every time I stopped to pee (and buy a seltzer, predicting the next stop) I'd never have to have a dedicated charge stop.

And the hoopla about winter driving range is pretty much moot if you have one with a heat pump.

A PHEV isn't a straight upgrade from a HEV, the extra weight from the batteries typically means once your out of your small electric only range, you get worse MPG than the HEV

At least for me, it's not just charging time for longer distance driving, it's charger availability. Driving a gas car, I can be pretty confident that as long as I'm not driving through Death Valley, I will be able to easily find numerous places where I just need a credit card and I can fill up.

Electric chargers on the other hand are a festival of incompatibility, unreliability, unexpectedly slow charging, broken chargers, mandatory terrible apps, lack of availability off major roads, etc. Now every trip is like driving a gas car through the middle of rural Australia, where you have to carefully plan your stops and hope nothing goes wrong.

Now I admit all that is getting better, but the experience is still worse than taking a road trip in a gas car. And most importantly, it's something people feel less comfortable relying on. If the only difference was time to fill up, I don't think it would be an issue for a lot of people.

It's honestly not like that anymore. I thought I'd read that Tesla fired their supercharging team, but ten more have opened around my city in the last six months.

The price of electricity keeps dropping too, because the networks are competing with each other. And even cheap hotels more and more often have free L2 charging - I had multiple options in Casper, Wyoming, a few months ago!

I road trip far more than the average American, and I think it's no longer an issue.

This is the stupidest discriminatory hurdle that ought to be regulated ASAP.

With cash or card on hand you can get fossil fuels with only one question asked, "anything else?". Electricity? Boy, you better have that curriculum vitae on hand, because we're gonna get to know each other very well before that IoT relay makes contact.

An interesting one for me is that living in Texas, there is a punitive tax on registration for EVs, but not plug-in hybrids. It's not terribly significant, but it is worth mentioning. Otherwise, range anxiety is still a factor.

As much as I hate those taxes, they do make a bit of sense. The gas taxes pay for the roads, but if you're charging at home, everyone else is paying for your wear and tear on roads.

I calculated I'd need to drive an electric vehicle about 80,000 miles a year for them to break even with gas taxes. Not to mention that road damage goes up at something like the 4th power to vehicle weight, so it's heavy trucks that take most of the toll on roads.

Didn't realize they were that much. That's crazy. They should be based on either the odometer of the car, or the 12k-15k miles/year average driving amount.

Heavy trucks do cause the vast majority of road wear and tear, but EVs do tend to weigh more. Hell, my ford lightning with it's extended battery weighs over 6k pounds. 50% heavier than normal vehicles, but doesn't hold a candle to a loaded semi.

> I think the Kia EV6 can charge from 10-90% in 18 minutes,

How's the battery health after 15 years ?

I can't speak to the Kia specifically, by my EV (Ford lightning) comes with a 10 year warranty on the battery.

Unless you don't have access to charging at home, DC fast charging is exceptionally rare. When I leave home, I have 300 miles before I need to use a DC fast charger, so I think I've used a DC fast charger around a dozen times. That's probably average, and would have minimal impact on battery health.

If you're always fast charging though, that could cause problems, don't quote me but I think I saw something talking about ten years of simulated fast charging cut 14% off the battery life. I wouldn't be surprised if 15 years show similar since battery pack failure is a bathtub curve.

Probably ~90%

Battery anxiety is real, at least here in Montana. I don't have my supercharger adapter yet (been 6 months, probably be another 6 months at this rate), and the only chargers that were available to me on my last trip were the Level 1 chargers. I made it back home (day trip) with about 14% battery, but the speed at which the battery was falling made me exceptionally anxious.

My EV remains a local "for fun" vehicle for the foreseeable future.

Thats 2.5l/100km (40km/liter) for us metric luddites.

Thats indeed very very impressive!

The article does not mention, but I wonder what the average speed was over the whole distance. Extreme mileage is pretty useless if you are going at a snail's pace.

Not a snail's pace, but sub-highway-speed for sure. As you get very slow internal resistance and continuous power draw start to dominate. Peak efficiency in a Model Y is somewhere around 40-45mph.

> Not a snail's pace, but sub-highway-speed for sure.

~70kph is the optimal speed for regular gas cars, for EVs it's even lower apparently

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Radu-Tarulescu/publicat...

https://www.polestar-forum.com/attachments/img_5724-jpg.1268...

>2.5l/100km

They managed to beat 25 year old Euro car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Lupo#Lupo_3L

I regularly get 56+ mpg out of a stock non-hybrid diesel 2015 Ford Focus with a 1499cc engine (and it has a turbo on it). It's not hard, it's just conscientious driving: gentler acceleration, coasting to lights a little more, driving at optimal speeds rather than the fastest speeds the speed limit allows, using cruise control when you can (it'll coast more than you do on gentle declines when able), using speed limiters when you can't.

I feel like if I had time in my life for a new hobby, hyper-mile driving like this could be it. :)

I've driven between Boston and Montreal in a 2018 Prius Prime and got something like 60 mpg despite a large part of the trip being through the mountains of Vermont. Hybrids are a fantastic technology that, in a rational world, should have completely taken over the mainstream car market 15 years ago. Momentum seems to be slowly going towards PHEVs, which actually benefit even more from ubiquitous charging infrastructure than long-range BEVs. Unfortunately having owned a PHEV for the last 5 years, charger availability does not feel like has expanded at all, despite there being 10x as many EVs on the roads as 5 years ago. So if you can even find a charger, it is probably occupied.

I see some people suggesting that 18–19 mph with minimizing stopping is what maximizes efficiency:

https://www.reddit.com/r/prius/s/klltPluFdZ

So I suppose route planning is mainly about trying to find long stretches of back roads without too many intersections? I even wonder if you need a car ahead to report on stoplight timing, so you can accelerate or decelerate slightly to avoid stopping. Or to tell you when it's safe to barrel through stop signs, that nobody is coming in the other direction.

Oh interesting - so there's a time cost that isn't necessarily considered.

And distance. As the distance to get from A to B increases, mpg becomes less important of a metric than total fuel consumption.

(1 mile / 60 mpg)/(2 miles / 90 mpg) = 0.75

Traveling 1 mile @ 60 mpg consumes 75% of the fuel as going 2 miles @ 90 mpg does.

Edit: *Assuming the route planning grand-OP mentioned to optimize for mpg goes significantly out of the way.

I wish there were more details about the strategy/techniques he used. This reminds me of reading up on Cannonball runs [0] (racing coast-to-coast as fast as possible). Though this is a lot more pro-social!

[0] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/10/coast-to-coast-in-under...

93 mpg = 2.53 l/100km

> on an exploratory drive averaging 68.1 mph prior to the record attempt, Geddes managed 58.1 mpg. No bullshit, no tricks, no crazy descents, just ridiculously good fuel economy.

This is not surprising to those of us who drive Priuses

Exactly. My prius gen2 gets me 4.2l/100km (56 mpg) on regular rides. How manages to stretch it to 93 is quite an achievement.

Yup, I get around 64mpg in a Corolla Hybrid without trying at all.

Hybrids are definitely going to be the way at least for the next decade.

China is already full steam ahead on pure BEVs; if that does happen it will probably be due to tariffs.

I think plug-in hybrids are the current sweet spot for people who can charge at home (or maybe at work). The results in this article are impressive, but cross-country trips across America aren't very representative of the kinds of driving people actually do. Most trips, especially daily commuting, are short enough that a plug-in hybrid could do the entire trip on battery power and then you have the gas engine for longer distance trips where it behaves like a regular hybrid.

All-electric cars are getting closer, but the long distance driving experience just isn't as good yet as driving a gas car. But that will continue to improve and electric cars have a lot of other advantages like simplicity, so I'm fairly confident they'll win out eventually. But as you said, for at least the next decade hybrid cars occupy a pretty good niche.

Really depends on how batteries develop, in my opinion. If we see a jump in energy density and charging speeds that allows e.g. a VW Golf sized car to have a range of 400-500 miles (with larger vehicles with larger batteries being able to go even further), the appeal of hybrids diminishes significantly. That’s a good enough range to close remaining gaps in the NA charger grid and longer than many ICE cars can go without a refill.

I'm not sure this is true.

Keep in mind that the traditional car companies make higher profit on their gas architectures, so it's in their best interest to slow the transition to EVs, and give you this perception. They're spinning a high interest rate driven slowdown in car sales as a shift away from EVs - but it's a slowdown in sales overall that impacts gas vehicles as well.

It looks to me like in much of the US, a Prius is currently more expensive to buy or lease (including incentives) than a Tesla 3 or a Hyundai Kona EV - and cheaper to operate and maintain, especially in states like Washington that both have cheap electricity and carbon pricing. I suspect much of the operations cost difference is eaten by higher insurance costs in much of the US, though.

A lot of the legacy manufacturers are still producing cars that are essentially their old architectures with EV tech, which is expensive to manufacture. Some are releasing vehicles built on an EV-first architecture in the next year, reducing costs, so you're going to see continued competition on price.

On top of that, new EVs may last longer than gas vehicles. EV batteries increasingly last 300,000+ miles, and hold their capacity better over that time with each new chemistry.

Two years ago I thought people were crazy to buy an EV, charging infrastructure was a mess, technology didn't seem mature. But at this point unless you're trying to drive to the Yukon in your daily driver, it's a bit crazy to buy something as complex as a gas vehicle.

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