So, A Prius Is Slow?

Who are who?

Ah, here we go.

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and he lived to tell the tale! unlike the poor chap in boston. 'i've had my fair share' makes me nervous though.

 

We have many cars in America that will exceed 150.
Some OEM cars are close to 200, and are tweaked by their owners to exceed 200mph.

Sadly.....
I own none of these.

I've been.......well..........
Between 100-200mph.....

 

Why do Americans need 200hp+ cars (220 average) when Europeans are happy with 110hp (average for EU)? I'm still a bit puzzled. Autocross?

 

we have a choice between good, and evil. choose good!

 

After my wife drove our 1974, Plymouth 400 ci, wagon in Nova Scotia following the km/h speed limits using the USA mph gauge . . . well I still have metric nightmares.

Bob Wilson

 

American roads are bigger, straighter, and longer.
We're dreadful drivers but we have to go much further between stops than many Europeans do, since we're rather more spread out.

Also....Most Americans are NOT happy with 200BHP.
Priuses are considered to be VERY slow cars here and they have 130.
My Truck has 315.
Many proper sports cars over here have 400-500BHP.
It helps that Gasoline is considerably less than $2.00USD per gallon.

In the end, it all boils down to where you drive.
In highly urbanized areas, then smaller displacement lower BHP engines are fine.
Certainly not fun, but OK for getting from A to B.

Despite our relative poor driving skills, we DO like to have fun on the highway.....and I can tell you that travelling at three digit speeds in the proper place and at the proper time is.........FUN!!!

 

Well.... Three things.

First, their cars are bigger, so they're heavier, and they need more power.

Second, they can afford to have heavy cars with big engines, because their petrol is cheap.

And third, they do like their big statistics. That's why they watch basketball and American football (both of which have very high scores), rather than proper sports like soccer (full of artistry, but with low scores). So they like cars which are powerful, rather than good.

Oh, and fourth. To compensate for their "small hands"....

In Britain, because they use miles, but people often drive their cars in Mainland Europe, your speedo has two rings. The outer ring is in mph, in big numbers, and the inner ring is in km/h, in smaller numbers.

I'd say that most people could give you a reasonable km/h approximation if they're asked to convert an mph speed, and vice versa. The same goes for British people my age (but probably not younger people) in converting Fahrenheit to Centigrade, at least for normal weather temperatures.

For much of my childhood, including the times I went to the US on holiday with my parents, the Pound-to-US-Dollar exchange rate was almost exactly the same as the mph-to-km/h ratio, which made things nice and easy.

There are several roads in the Northern Territory in Australia where there are no speed limits. The view is that the distances are so absurdly big, and the roads are so featureless, that people would fall asleep and crash if they had to drive at much less than 90mph.

 

If the Prius had 1/2 the total horsepower it does, I would worry for my safety. I have no worries with any Prius I have owned.

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I drove 2 Mazda GLCs with about 60 HP, and a power robbing AWD Toyota Corolla All-trac station wagon with about 105 HP, so I am used to low HP cars.

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Oooh, yes. Low HP cars are a special experience.

When I was about 17-20, my mum had a Citroen AX10e.



It had 45hp.

It was OK if there was only one person in it, and you were only driving in town. But there were a couple of times at the start of term that I used it to get to university. There'd be four of us in the car, plus all my clothes and books and stuff. We'd have to travel along the M62 (@GrumpyCabbie knows the road), a motorway that goes over the mountains between Lancashire and Yorkshire. You go through a series of valleys.

I'd build up speed going downhill, and get it up to about 90mph. By the time I got to the top of the next hill, I'd be down to 25mph, and fully-laden trucks would be passing me.

Also, the handbrake came off in my hand once. Not a great car.

 

Whew. Thanks for being diplomatic. I thought it was the weight of our butts, not the cars themselves.

Please, don't judge all of us by our loudest Presidential candidate.

For the past 40-ish years, all U.S.-market cars with analog speedometers have shown the same two mph / kph rings. But I'd say that a much lower fraction of Americans could make a reasonable approximate conversion.

I'm used to an 88 HP Ford 2.3L, and a more spry 110 HP Honda. After those, this Prius is positively sporting. And the 165-170 HP Subarus are absolute monsters, though still rate as FSPs (fuel sucking pigs).

 

I like how you mispronounce this "proper sport" just like us Yanks. It's called football.

 

In Australia, "football" (or "footy") generally means "rugby league" in the outer suburbs of Sydney and the whole of Queensland, and "Australian Rules Football" in Central Sydney and the whole of Victoria. So I've got used to gritting my teeth and saying "soccer" when I mean "real football". But I don't like doing it.

I am in no position to criticise on that front.

Oh, but I think we must. All those Ford F-150s and aircraft carriers and Cruise missiles suddenly make a lot more sense now.

Of course, there's the corollary for Prius drivers. Prii are unusually small cars by American standards, so we can only assume there is no small-hands issue there.

Ah, OK. It's so long since I've driven a car in the US that I can't remember.

 

I should note that the Prius is not a small car by my personal standards, and is actually larger than the car it replaced. And only barely different than the largest vehicle in the household at that time.

Sadly, maybe my 'hands' are suffering a bit from age. The household now has one of those things called an 'SUV'. But at least it is still rated as a 'small SUV', so any compensation remains minor.

 

I think you exagerate. There's no way it would do 25 mph at the top of the hills

I don't think the Americans appreciate some of the underpowered cars we get over here. I've read them relishing what appear to be amazing mpg's with some concern over 0-60 times, but they just couldn't appreciate that same run you describe in such a car, as it has probably never happened to them. You're in your little French/Italian (usually a Citroen, Peugeot or Fiat) rot box, fully loaded, tunes on, foot to the floor yet the car is getting slower and slower and slower. You're doing 40/50 mph when you make it to the top, foot to the floor, smoke pouring out the back, buttocks clenched and knuckles white. Happy days.

They don't know they're born. Saying that, they miss the fun of hammering an underpowered car to within an inch of it's life. Dropping down into 2nd to take a bend on a narrow country lane imagining you're some Finnish rally driver, red lining that little 1.0 litre engine, attempting to get all four wheels off when you hit the C13th hump back bridge at 80. There's definitely some fun in all that - ahh to be young again.

 

Once while looking down from my 4th story hotel room, I noticed that my prius occupied as much if not more surface area as many of the other cars, including suv's

 

You somehow managed to quote something I never said.







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Longest trip I do yearly in a car clocks in about 600km both ways. And that's almost a cross country trip .

 

I don't remember the car model my mom had when they toured Europe in her college days, but I do remember they had to stop with the trucks in the mountains to allow the car to cool. My dad had '74(I think) Super Beetle when I was a kid in the mid-'80s.

More recently, a friend got the old family Legacy wagon for college. The car from was long before Subaru went all AWD here. He had to turn the A/C off on hills in order to maintain speed.

I think it started when the country attempted to go metric, and our neighboring countries use km.
Digital displays, and the ones that still have a dial are digital, have dropped that. In stead, you have to switch units somewhere in the settings.

 

My 94 MX5 was the best and funnest car that I've ever owned out of over 30.
Bar none!

But.....it wasn't fast.
They were rated at about 130 BHP (5 less than a Prius) and would get to 60mph in about 8 seconds (2 fewer than a Prius) and their 1/4 mile times were about 16-seconds.
BUT......
They were nimble, they were REAR WHEEL DRIVE, and they had just about a perfect 50-50 weight distribution.
They even had a proper hand brake, instead of the goofy pedal affair that buzz-kill car companies put in lesser equipped cars.
Mine was about a Thanksgiving turkey's weight under 2200 pounds, and it was a joy to drive----even on interstate commutes.
Even with the lower output motor, it was both faster and quicker than a Prius---and it got fairly good fuel economy considering that we're talking about a car that was several years into development------24 years ago.

As a nation, we were emerging from a horrible time of see-no-evil 85-mph speedometers, 55MPH highway speed limits, and lackluster cars that were slow and boring to drive.
Today's cars are safer, more powerful, more efficient, and the roads have something approaching a proper speed limit.

That's why even an econobox today has close to 150BHP and is more likely than not to be VSS limited in the low 3-digits.