Questions from a techno-moron trumpet player

I've had my new 2008 Touring #2 for about a week and need clarification on several points. Seems the salesmen aren't as knowledgable as all of you on Prius chat and I have a few questions that I haven't been able to answer by reading the manual. 1. On the energy screen what's the difference between the green / blue battery display? 2. On the consumption screen...is that consumption of fuel or battery and are the green car icons good or bad? That's all for now and thanks for the wonderful posts from all of you.

blue is green with yellow mixed in, the green car icons are good cause theyre green...

wasnt that good
green=battery near full chg, blue is descending in chg then comes pinkish which is very nice color
green car icons are amount of energy you saved in watt hours, if you save enough you can light your house with them

It's fine to be in blue rather than green. It just means there's more room for regenerative braking...

The colors are redundant with the number of the bars, and the whole thing is just eye candy. As long as it is ON ("READY") and shifted into "D" or "P" the car manages its own battery, there's not the slightest need to worry about or try to manage the number of bars.

The "Consumption" screen indicates fuel consumed. The cars show the amount of energy that the battery has recovered which otherwise would have been wasted as heat in the brakes. Perhaps surprisingly, you want to drive so as to *minimize* the number of cars, to the extent that you can do that without braking. This is because energy conversions into and out of the battery themselves waste energy. And in fact the amount of energy recovered is not very large: four cars is about enough energy to accelerate the car from zero to 60 MPH once.

Fuel economy short path zen:
- Accelerate briskly (this uses the engine most efficiently)
- Gliding (no arrows on the "Energy" display) is better than coasting
- Coasting is better than braking
- Braking is better than stopping
- Stopping is better than running into something :_>
Check tire pressures at least monthly. (For a little more discussion of tire pressures see http://priuschat.com/forums/prius-technical-discussion/48209-tire-pressures.html)
Avoid going faster than about 65 MPH.

The car actually regards 6 blue bars as optimal. As Richard suggests, the car's computers manage the battery very well. They are very protective of it and do an excellent job of keeping it from excess charge or depletion.

Along those lines, 8 green bars still is only about 80% charged, whereas an "empty" battery on the Energy display still is about 40%. See this for a discussion, with graphics, on the relationship between the display and state of charge.