Hybrid Superstar Shines Brighter

Toyota says the new car completed the government‘s test cycle with an economy rating of 51 m.p.g. in city driving and 48 m.p.g. on the highway. Combined mileage came out at an industry-leading 50 m.p.g. In much of the nation these days, you can fill the Prius’s 11.9-gallon tank for less than $20.

But get this: in my road testing of the new Prius, I managed 69 m.p.g. That happened on a 34-mile route of mostly stop-and-go driving, at an average speed of 27 m.p.h. A journalist who drove the same route averaged even better — 74 m.p.g. — although he admitted to driving so far below the speed limit on public roads that he considered himself lucky to have survived.

Will you, the prospective Prius buyer, have any chance of matching those numbers, at least while observing all traffic laws?

With practice, yes, but you will probably have to alter your driving style. My best mileage came when my foot moved on and off the accelerator like a teenager on the first day of driver’s ed.

Earlier, Akihiko Otsuka, the Prius’s chief engineer, had claimed to average 62.9 m.p.g. on the same route, and issued a challenge to top that. When I and my fellow auto writer crushed it, he asked what technique we had used. “It seems to respond well to pulse-and-glide,” I said.

He grinned and nodded.

Pulse-and-glide is the technique that I recently used to achieve 65 m.p.g. in another new hybrid, the 2010 Honda Insight. Basically, it consists of goosing the gas pedal for about 10 seconds to bring up the speed and torque efficiency of the gasoline engine, then gliding with your foot off the accelerator for a few seconds to bring in maximum benefit from the electric motors. You can monitor the effect this style is having by watching the “instantaneous fuel consumption meter” and the new “hybrid system indicator” graph on the information-laden dashboard display.

The previous-generation Prius did not respond as well to this herky-jerky driving style, but the new car certainly does. My co-driver for this exercise, Rick Kranz of Automotive News, drove a steady, conservative speed on the route and averaged 56 m.p.g.

“Now try doing it with pulse-and-glide,” I suggested.

His average immediately jumped to 65 m.p.g. “It works,” he agreed. “But it’s a good way to make everyone carsick.”

The Prius now offers three performance modes that the driver can select: EV for or electric-only, ECO for economy and POWER for, well, you get it.

In EV mode it is possible to travel up to a mile — at 24 m.p.h. or less —on battery power alone. But that discharges the battery, and it takes 20 to 30 miles of subsequent driving to recharge it.

ECO moderates a driver’s more erratic tendencies. It can be left on all the time, as it was for my 69 m.p.g. run.

The POWER setting takes its toll on mileage, but enables runs from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in 9.8 seconds. That will not induce whiplash, but it is four-tenths of a second quicker than the 2009 Prius.
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