Caught the body shop driving my Prius hard.....

My guess is that they left the car on while they were working on it which would have dropped your MPG. Even if they drove it for 3 miles, it wouldn't take much to drop the average down if you only had 10 miles on the tank. My MPG can vary wildly until I get some miles on the tank.

 

Suck it up, more likely that it has not been left on, on purpose.

 

Maybe they took it to the local 1/4 mile drag strip and did 10-12 passes?......to dry the paint...??

 

I agree, they had it in "ready" in the shop for a few hours, best apologize to them for your short... shortsightedness.

 

Do a little self test...

Reset a trip meter & re-achieve your 10 mile/50mpg reading. Then proceed to do a number of cold engine starts while it warms up & maybe drive it around the "repair shop". I would bet it won't take long to drop your avg. without doing anything nefarious.

I would also assume they took the car up to freeway speeds to verify no weird wind noises or rattling after the bumper cover was installed. That will drop to the 30's mpg very easily.

 

That is just 2 or 3 cold start cycles while they had it. Not any indicator of hard driving.

P.S.: At 50 mpg, your car should have used 0.26 gallons to go 13 miles. At pickup, it had used 0.38 gallons, so 0.12 gallon is 'missing'.

From a past car, I had a very crude rule of thumb that a cold start cycle costs very roughly 2-miles-equivalent of gas just for warmup, in addition to the fuel needed to actually move the car for short trips. The Prius very roughly follows the same guideline. That 0.12 gallons represents 6 miles of driving, or at most 3 cold start cycles where the car may have been started to move a short distance, and allowed to warm up before being shut off.

If you (or they) let the engine warm at pickup time, before driving away from the shop, that counts as one of the warmup cycles.

 

Is that just one cold start? Repeat three times, allowing many hours to cool off in between.

By engine operating temperature standards, it is 'cold' every morning.

 

how then, did it get 13 miles put on it?

 

Between post-repair test drive, and moving it around between shop locations, 3 added miles is not unreasonable.

 

So .... First ... you are concerned about what they body shop did in under 3 miles? Based on the MPG readout ?

Add to that ....... worried enough that you sent off an e-mail .... !

Sorry ..... Unbelievable.

 

Concentrate on their workmanship, fugedabout the mpg.

We once had a Civic Hybrid in the shop, took close to month. The car showed 29 liters per 100 km when we picked it up, lol.

 

true, that miles of flooring it and sliding in sideways to parking spots is no big deal. he was probably watching the latest prius commercials.

 

(1) how many miles does the trip meter show after this series? I need to compute the amount of 'missing' fuel.
(2) What was your engine coolant temperature for those cold starts? (I.e. ScanGauge or other engine monitor reading.) And what was it after the warmup cycles? Mine can't cool fast enough to do that many in just 24 hours.

 

3 miles to test how solid the repairs might be- would be fine with me.

Better than them just slapping the parts on, then rolling it into a parking spot.

As far as the drop in MPG?
Short trips....such as 3 miles, CAN drop MPG's quickly.
Or maybe they did accidentally leave it running a bit.

In either case? My concern would be with the quality of the repair they did. If that's acceptable? I'm going to ignore 3 miles added to the odometer.

Trust me...I've heard worse stories.

 

I find usually if a body shop put on some miles it's to take it to some sub-contractor.

 

So the OP posts about his 03 with 275k of hard miles ... and he is concerned about 3miles on a Prius?

Sorry .. I have to come back and comment on this because it is so silly. Nothing could be done in 3 miles to harm it.

This is why I'm so glad I don't work with the public.