In a span of 19 days, I had to make two long road trips in my Prius due to a family emergency. The trips were over 1200 miles each way. Due to the short notice, buying airline tickets would’ve been prohibitively expensive so I drove my car, taking a bit over a day and a half each way.
I drove my car at or slightly above posted interstate highway speeds (65-75 MPH depending on the state). Before starting on each trip, I reset one of my odometers too keep track of the distance and mileage. For the first trip, I averaged 49.4 MPH. On the second trip, I averaged 48.4 MPH. This is without any attempt at hypermiling or anything other than ordinary driving. For most of both trips, I was averaging over 50 MPH until I hit high winds driving across Kansas. I’ve found that the Prius is very vulnerable to headwinds, sometimes dropping to about 40 MPG at highway speeds when the winds are high. While I’ve never done it, I’m sure that driving near the car’s max speed will cut into the mileage sharply like those headwinds do.
A hybrid like the Prius is usually optimized for city driving. I routinely get over 50 MPG in town even along my preferred route which has 55 MPH speed limits and a lot of traffic lights, meaning there’s a lot of stop and go driving. It’ll get significantly better mileage at lower speeds. I’ve read that the Honda Insight hybrid gets slightly lower mileage in town than a Prius but may be better optimized for highway driving. It’s also at least a couple thousand dollars cheaper than a Prius, too. I test drove one and almost bought it but my wife liked the ride of the Prius better.
There are other cars such as some of the VW diesels that’ll get better mileage on the highway than just about any hybrid. From what I’ve read, they’re good cars, too. Normally, most of my driving is in town where a hybrid makes more sense.
“Drill Baby Drill” so the price of gas will come down and we won’t have to worry about gas mileage.
