High fuel consumption?

What kind of vehicle before the C and what MPG did you get from it?

In case you're driving the same and depends on what model of the old car if the new one is much less gas usage so I guess it's working fine.

 

Thanks for the correction - I'm just another dumb Yank.

 

The difference is that in the Echo, you didn't know how much gas you were really using (except perhaps at each fillup if you calculated manually). Now with this car, you KNOW!
Don't worry, you will be getting better fuel economy in the C but it will take some time and practice to extract all the fuel economy performance out of it.

I agree that 3.9l/100km is way optimistic for everyone but the most avid hypermiler. We just got our 2015 C a few days ago and my wife, who has never really driven a hybrid and never really cared for fuel economy, is getting roughly 4.4l/100km on 10km runs (on country roads with only a few stops). I drove it over the weekend and with 8 years hybrid driving experience, managed to get 3.8l/100km on a short drive with the engine already warmed up and going down a few hills. On the highway going 90km/hr (we still believe in the break-in period), I got 4.4l/100km this afternoon. But "only" managed to get 4.9 on the way back, climbing back up some hills and at near freezing temps.

The MPGs you mention in your post are actually imperial mpg and not US mpg... They actually turn out to be:
6.7l/100km = 35mpg us (city) and 5.2l/100km = 45mpg us (hwy). Don't forget that over the years, the estimated fuel consumption figures have been revised to be more realistic.

Even with those "optimistic" numbers for the Echo, the C would still give you better numbers with more "realistic" numbers today:

City: Echo 6.7 vs Prius C 4.5 so 33% better.
Highway: Echo 5.2 vs Prius C 4.8 so 8% better.

Don't forget that these EPA numbers are exactly for this purpose, to compare between cars and not what you should expect no matter how you drive it or what your driving conditions are. In this case, the comparison is skewed towards the Echo due to different EPA rating methods.

Enjoy your new (to you) Prius C and don't worry too much about the fuel economy you are getting right now. The beauty of a hybrid is that if you put enough effort and practice into it, you can get the kind of fuel economy that you want. It's all a matter of how much trouble/effort is worth it in the end.

Cheers from a fellow Canadian (from Montreal),
Daniel

 

It's just metric experience: 6.6 (liters per 100 km) is what our Civic Hybrid got, in what passes for winter on our west coast, on Nokian WRG2 all-weather.

 

He said "with 8 years hybrid driving experience", don't expect to master that in the first week.

 

I think 4.9 is pretty darned good!
Have it checked if it'll put your mind at ease but don't be surprised when they tell you everything is normal (because it probably is!) besides, you probably know more how to drive a hybrid than most of them do and unless something is falling off or bursting into flames, they will tell you it's normal (don't ask me how come I know) ;-)

 

You can always adjust the gas price anytime in Eco Savings screen.

 

I guess you don't have the manual so I hope these pics will help.

 

I wouldn't waste time telling you you shouldn't of bought a Prius c.
You did, and it's a great vehicle. And you will get better gas mileage in comparison to nearly anything else regardless of short trip commutes or warm up times.
So enjoy it.

And I tell ALL new Prius owners who start worrying about the gas mileage on their first tank or within the first few weeks just to relax and start computing gas mileage at the pump and over a few tank fulls. A larger sample size will give you a better idea of what gas mileage you are really returning.

For now? Just drive, learn, relax and enjoy. There is really no reason not to do so.

 

For what it's worth, out here in Vancouver on the Left Coast I've averaged 4.2l/100km over the 11,500km since I bought my 2012 Prius C last year. That's actual based on the actual litres pumped into the tank and a wide range of trip lengths from short to long. I find that the fuel economy reported by the car is about 5% optimistic (i.e., it reports better fuel economy than I actually achieve). It looks like I'm getting somewhere between 5 and 10% better fuel economy in the summer than in the winter, although our winters are fairly mild by comparison with the rest of Canada.

Even before buying the Prius I've always been a fairly gentle driver - I don't accelerate hard and I slow down in advance of red lights so that I can often avoid having to come to a complete stop. With the Prius showing me fuel economy I can see that behaviour being rewarded in real time.

 

We've only had the Prius C for about a week now so I don't have alot of experience on it yet (there's still less than 400km on the odo!) but my own car is a 2013 Camry Hybrid I've had since new. My yearly average used to be 5.9l/100km and I drove around 25000km per year. Since about a year ago, I now take the train to work so I only drive 10km each way to the train station. Needless to say that this impacted negatively on my L/100km readings and I am now getting 6.0 average but my liters per year have been cut in half!

I think the impact of short runs is worse on a bigger and heavier car with an engine nearly double the size of the C (2.5L with a combined HP of 200!) and my best summer tanks are now around 5.5 and my worse winter tanks are in the mid-7s I am still holding on to my 6.0 yearly average (calculated at the pump) as the Camry also registers about 5% too optimistic on the dash readout.

All this to say that winter will bring you some discouraging numbers (probably) but over a whole year, city and highway, short and long trips, you should get some pretty good numbers.

Enjoy,
Daniel

 

Trip mpg will be up and down like a yoyo. I'd just do the best you can, don't look too close. When you tank up note the odometer reading, and if you want, reset the tripmeter. Go through that tank, and when you next fill up, again note the odometer, reset the tripmeter, and hang on to the gas receipt.

You've now got all the info needed to accurately calculate how you did for that tank. Then. Just keep at it.

 

The 4.2l/100km figure I quoted is my overall economy for all my trips. Most of those trips are longer than 15km. When I go back and look at my log of trips, the shorter the trip the worse the fuel economy as you'd expect. For example for trips under 10km my average fuel economy was about 6 l/100km. For trips between 10 and 20km, my average was around 4.5 l/100km. Beyond that trips averaged 4 l/100km. All of those figures are the ones reported on the display by the car, but as I mentioned I've found that actual fuel economy as measured by litres pumped at the gas station is about 5% worse than that.

In seasonal terms, my averages for the cooler months here in Vancouver are around 4.3 l/100km and for the warmer months around 4.1 l/100km. But there's only around a 15-20C difference between typical winter and summer days here.

Of course fuel economy is highly dependent on driving conditions as well as driving style. If you're driving in start/stop traffic then you're going to do worse than if the traffic flows smoothly. I avoid rush hours and do most of my driving in relatively decent traffic.