My first road trip!

When it comes to my family outings, I tend to drive the bigger vehicle and not my Prius. Comfort and safety for my family outweighs the fuel economy savings. I don't think I ever could have fit all my cars seats like you did. My kids would be screaming and yelling from lack of personal space.....no fuel savings is worth that headache.

 

I love the Prius for road trips, but it's amazing you were able to fit 3 seats for the kids. We went to LA recently with my daughter and granddaughter in the back and they had plenty of room, but 3 kids would have made it a lot more interesting. Sounds like you have some fairly well-behaved kids to even attempt a day-trip like that. When it comes to boys "fighting", we had those problems in the 7-passenger van, so it's not necessarily because of the smaller Prius.

 

I have that experience, I have to custom make a pillow case fill with foam pad sandwich with card board, my twins always fight even with room in the middle.

 

We bought our Prius Three first of November and decided to take it to Grand Junction, Colorado for Thanksgiving. we had three adults plus luggage for the trip. This is close to 800 miles each way and the route took us up the I15 past Vegas and Cedar City then I70 over to Grand Junction. We had to go over some serious mountains on the I70 and some of the grades made our Prius really struggle to keep speed at 75 but it did keep up.
Overall we got just a little over 44 mpg calculated for the entire trip which was a little lower than I was expecting.
I do admit that the Prius is amazing for a small car but it is still a small car and I will not be taking it on long trips again. My '09 Camry Hybrid has pulled in about 34 to 35 mpg on that same trip but it will do the trip without straining too much, plus it is much more comfortable.
Overall the Prius is my wife's car and she loves it for getting her around our local area so it will serve it's purpose for the next ten years or so, but I won't be using it for long trips.

 

well speed kills mpg, I can imagine what the mpg readout was at 75mph up a steep grade, but having a Camry Hybrid is a great alternative for trips, I cannot but agree with your decision for future trips.

 

Yep/55MPH or below is your best MPG. Also 42PSI or above. Speed control in hilly situations could decrease your MPG.
I get 53 MPG on heavy loads and trips for vacation.

 

Don't know if it'd be safe to try 55 mph on the I-15/I-70 corridor between Vegas and Grand Junction, you might just get run over. Even then, I'm not sure you'd be able to get 53 actual mpg with the sizeable hills, but I'm sure you'd be able to do better than 44.

I just did some quick calculations for my upcoming 2,100 mile trip to FL and if I went 55 instead of 70 to get 53 vs 44 mpg, I'd save a whopping $16 at today's gas prices (47 gals vs 39 @ $2), but it'd take me another night and that would cost far more for a motel. In the case of the 800 mile trip, we're talking 15 vs 18 gals for $6 savings and we're talking 14 vs 11 hours. If one doesn't stop for the night along the way, the 3 hours is worth the $6 to me. If one does stop, then it's a moot point. Still, for the price of a Big Mac, I'd rather get there 3 hours earlier, but that's just me.

 

I agree. There's more to life than just MPG.

 

First winter road trip for us with our Prius.

We needed to be in Massachusetts for a memorial service (today) so we headed out Friday morning and drove as far as Utica, NY. For (my wife and me) it's a good long distance car. Managed to avoid the lake effect of the day by cutting across from Sarnia to Queenston Ontario (which is the shortest route in any event). Saw a lot of snow blowing across the fields and some very happy wind turbines.

Descending to The Thruway from Lewiston we could see the wall of clouds and snow to the south. The Thruway was quite empty eastbound since it was closed along Lake Erie.

I'll close with a picture I took the next morning illustrating why we eventually have rust issues with cars up here.

 

No kidding. Cures me of wanting to do a winter trip.

 

I'm not interested in hyper-mileing so the 44 mpg does not bother me, but I do respect machinery and the strain I heard climbing the grades at 75 mph on the i70 towards Grand Junction really bothered me. I did take it off cruise and back off to 55 or so to lessen the strain, but that is the first time I have had to do that during any trip.
Again, I will not strain a machine like that again so our Camry will get us to Grand Junction in the future or any other long trips we come up with.

 

I hear what you're saying Ken and I was concerned about that too when we went to Grand Junction and on up to Glacier NP, but I thought the Prius had a rev limiter or something, so I'm not sure the noise we hear means the engine is "straining" to its limits. I haven't used Torque to watch the RPM, etc., to see what the engine is actually doing, so I'm curious how others feel about this.

 

'Tis the season for Winter Camo. Looks like you could use some grill blocking.

 

If you look closely the bottom grille is 100% blocked with pipe insulation.

We just got back this afternoon-- 1,625 total miles (including multiple runs to Logan for other family members). 51 mph average and an indicated 48.6 mpg. Based on past experience I'd derate the mileage to an actual 45.7 mpg. On all the turnpikes and freeways i kept the speed between 67 and 72 mph. Considering the average trip temperature was around 16 F I think we did pretty well.
The indicated mpg on arrival (before local runs) was 50.8 @ 60 mph average. To be fair, that was with a 25-30 mph tailwind though.

I did take a few minutes out to purchase an EZ-Pass from NY and really enjoyed it.

In Michigan we only pay tolls to cross a bridge or tunnel to Canada but the EZ-Pass handled about two dozen transactions in NY and MA and greatly reduced the hassle.

 

I realize that the car won't hurt itself but it bugs me to hear it strain too much so I backed off a little. Just one of my hang ups not abusing things hoping this will make them last a little longer.
Also, it was new in November with a thousand miles on it so I wasn't sure what to expect.