gas mileage

[Kirk Miller]

Hey guys i read in popular mechanics that there is a lithium ion battery kit for the prius were if you plug the car into an outlet when you're not driving it, you can 100 mpg. the kit costs $40,000.

my question is how many miles would you have to go, if the prius normally gets lets say 40 mpg, to justify getting this kit?

Thanks for your input
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Cargo Liners

[Bill Merchant]

Welcome to PriusChat Kirk!
Presuming you're not a troll trying to flame bait us, do a search for PHEV or conversion and you'll see many threads on Prius conversion. None cost $40K. Most people get over 40 MPG.

[Zythryn]

Could be an old issue.
There are a couple of kits I am aware of that have been announced.
One is $5k the other is $10.
As more are built and there is more companies joining the competition the prices should come down some.
At 100mpg you are basically saving one gallon of gas every 100 miles you drive. So if you drive 12,000 miles per year that would be 120 gallons of gas. At today's prices that is about $450 (depending upon what area you are in). If gas goes down to $2/gallon is would be a saving of $240. If it goes up to $8 it would be a annual saving of $960.
It would also be a lot less co2

So if you are considering this only for the financial gain, and not national security or environmental, wait for the competition to lower prices some, or for 2010 when car companies start releasing their own plug-ins.

[Danny Hamilton]

We'll pretend for the sake of this post that your numbers are all accurate.

We'll also assume that the average price of gasoline over the time period in question will be $3.90 per gallon

683,760 miles at 40 MPG = 17,094 gallons of gasoline
17,094 gallons of gasoline at $3.90 per gallon = $66,666.60

683,760 miles at 100 MPG = 6,837.6 gallons of gasoline
6,837.6 gallons of gasoline at $3.90 per gallon = $26,666.64

$66,666.60 - $26,666.64 = $39,999.96

(I'll toss in the 4 pennies if you get the conversion and actually drive the 683,760 miles. Just mail me a copy of the receipt from the conversion as well as an undoctored photo of the odometer.)

So if all you cared about was saving on the purchase price of gasoline vs. the purchase price of the conversion, you would either need to drive 683,760 miles or you would need more expensive gasoline prices.

As has been mentioned, there are less expensive plug-in conversions available. Also the price of gasoline is likely to increase beyond $3.90