2000Mile Winter Road Trip Recommendation

Are you kidding? Change transaxle fluid after a single trip through the mountains? How often then, would you suggest mountain dwellers change THEIR fluid?

 

Interesting maps...watched a Route 66 show the other night and the bottom map is really the original Route 66.

When I was a kid 100 years ago I drove from Florida to LA in a station wagon with my beloved Siberian Husky Fred. Went over those same mountains. Holy shite!!!

That and Texas never ever ends. By the time El Paso appears your just begging for it to end. 100's of miles of nothing. I saw this big cloud miles away....kept getting closer and closer...had no idea what it was...till I started hearing things hit the car. My first sand storm. It was a big one. Pulled over. Filled the car up with dust. Scared the crap out of me. Ruined the paint and made the car overheat within 20 miles. Had to change the oil.

Good times.

 

That much difference in that direction is actually a bit too much, and would draw the attention of the sharksXXXXXXlawyers. Are your new tires the same size as the originals? Have you rechecked this measurement? Or tried a different reference such as highway mileposts (which has other potential problems)?

 

With modern steel belted radials, that should not make a significant difference. And even on the older bias ply tires, it would bias the error in the opposite direction.

Try some rechecks or other measurement types when convenient. For me, the really convenient conditions don't happen very often.

 

The gen2 Prius oil change interval varies by country. In the UK and Europe it is and always has been 10,000 miles. This is of course using synthetic oil.

John (Britprius)

 

Glad you had a good trip with your Prius.

The uphill lag you experienced in the mountains had less to do with the Prius and more to do with the amount of oxygen available to your car and all other cars at this altitude. The pinging and drag is your car choking because it doesn't have enough oxygen. If you're simply traveling through, it's not a big deal. If you LIVE in the mountains, there are things that people do or did - like buy different octane gasoline or changing their engine timing - to deal with this.

 

Huh?

All my pinging in past cars happened at low altitude, not high. Up in the mountains, all those cars could get away with significantly lower octane than at sea level, which is why 85 octane is often available up there. Different octane isn't going to fix the dragging issue either.

And owners needing to change timing in a modern emission-controlled engine? Not any more.

 

>> all those cars could get away with significantly lower octane than at sea level
Which is why I said DIFFERENT octane and not HIGHER

>>And owners needing to change timing in a modern emission-controlled engine? Not any more.
Which is why I said DO OR DID...are there not cars on the road without electronic ignition?

Read much?

 

Octane-related pinging is fixed by using higher octane, not lower octane. If a given fuel won't ping at low elevation, it won't ping at higher elevation either, so there would be no performance benefit to changing it.

The last U.S-market cars without electronic ignition were made long long before the first Prius was invented. The 'DO' portion of you comment is long obsolete, so suggesting a timing change to a Prius owner is absolutely useless.

I'd ask that of you. But I'd be more interested in whether or not you drive much at high altitude.

 

Fuzzy...read and learn. I don't think anything I stated was incorrect. But if you inferred something incorrectly, I'm sure you'll let us all know.

And I wasn't making a recommendation to any Prius driver. I was simply explaining the phenomenon that he was experiencing at high altitude and trying to explain that it was fuel/air mixture related, and not HV battery related.

No, I don't drive much at high altitude but I have driven some.

 

Never heard of that site before, so they don't have a track record. It is also too generic and oversimplified, partially wrong, advice from a prior era:

While carburetors continue on those smaller engines, they pretty much vanished from the automotive market in the late 1980s. The last stragglers vanished from the passenger car market in 1990, and from the light truck market in 1994.

Step up a couple levels and search PriusChat or CarTalk for 'octane vs altitude' or similar keywords, and you could learn far more.
Octane and Altitude Revisited
fuel grade
Fuel 85 87
Gas question: 85 or 89?
prius climbing to 9,000 feet questions
Mountain Climbing slowed to a grinding hault.

Fuel octane at high altitude
Gas Octane & High Altitude Areas
octane rating
What is the effect of altitude (>10,000 feet) on a car's performance

That is not how I take the instant replay:

 

There it is. Thanks for enlightening us.

Full context of my remark:
If you're simply traveling through, it's not a big deal. If you LIVE in the mountains, there are things that people do or did - like buy different octane gasoline or changing their engine timing - to deal with this.

I know the OP doesn't live in the mountains - he was passing through, so I'm not speaking to him directly. I'm using YOU in a general sense. I can see how you misunderstood that - though I doubt many others did.

OK. Now that you've demonstrated that I'm not nearly as clever as you, I guess you win. Congratulations.

If anyone else would like to ignore Fuzzy1, simply click on your name above, and then People You Ignore - type in Fuzzy1, then click Save. It's a great feature...Fuzzy1's posts no longer appear on your screen.

By the way, Fuzzy, that guy you're yelling GET OFF MY LAWN!!! at, he's just the lawncare guy. Leave him alone and eat your yogurt. It'll be naptime soon.

 

No, that is less than half the full context to which I replied.

 

if you think Texas is bad never (and I mean never!) drive through Kansas on I-70. 500mi of nothing but flat open space, cows, occasional wind mill farms and constant Wizard of OZ museum billboards. There've gotta be at least a couple dozens of them alone the route.

At some point you start wonder, why this road has turns every few miles? there is nothing there to obscure it.

 

I'm curious why you didn't just fly. Accounting for gas, an oil change and incidentals, you're looking at roughly $400 and 8 days for travel if you slept in your car. If you include motels, that's likely more expensive than airfare.

 

.[/QUOTE]
if you think Texas is bad never (and I mean never!) drive through Kansas on I-70. 500mi of nothing but flat open space, cows, occasional wind mill farms and constant Wizard of OZ museum billboards. There've gotta be at least a couple dozens of them alone the route.

At some point you start wonder, why this road has turns every few miles? there is nothing there to obscure it.[/QUOTE]

Wow.
Texas was like a bad joke. You would see something...anything...coming up..and when you got there it was just an intersection with nothing else there. The other roads of the intersection just went on for miles with nothing.

 

He is probably looking for experience.

This is obviously in the past, so the comment is too late. Hopefully you had a good trip, and if you bailed out well it was probably a good thing.

I had driven/rode bike coast to coast across country several times. Out of major East-West routes had been on I-90, I-80, I-40. Had been on I-10 but not all way through, so can't comment on I-10. And all trips were in during warm period of time (though the was a trip to Seattle in Dec)

I-70: really great in summer. Very scenic west of Denver; Cottonwood canyon is a marvel, and there is alot to see alone the route. Not sure I'd like to be there in the winter, there are might be issues with snow. If I were not in the hurry, I'd make alot of side trips Rocky Mount NP, Mt Evans. Several 11,000'+ high passes on US 6 which runs in parallel. If time permits instead going straight to Salt Lake City and dropping down on I-15, I'd take UT-24/UT-12 and cut the corner from Green River to St. George. Best red rock country you'd see in lifetime, right in front of your eyes!

Now the bad thing about I-70: Kansas. 500mi of nothingness (look my comment above). After crossing Kansas on I-70 twice I swore not to do it ever again. Luckily there is alternative: you can take I-80 - I-76 to Boulder, and then US-34 through Rocky Mount NP to I-70. But it will be closed in winter.

I-44 from St Luis to OKC is not bad, and if you planning a stop in Amarillo, there is Palo Duro, the 2nd biggest canyon in CONUS just a few miles south. You will get to camp in the canyon. Usually busy during summer, so it is recommended to get your camp site in advance if you come late. There are a couple hundred miles of prairie land to cross in TX/east NM, but nothing as bad as Kansas. There are things to see alone the route like Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, Sedona, Blue Hole in NM, etc The most pristine section of Route 66 btw Seligman and Kingman; the one pictured in Disney's Cars.

One of the good things that I-40 does not go as high as I-70. Flagstaff is at 7,000' where Vail pass is ~10,000', so sn