My cross country trip with our new Prius!

My wife & I just got back from a cross country trip with my new Prius. We bought the car about 7 weeks ago & we've already driven from Santa Clara CA to Utah on a 1 week national park vacation & then 2 weeks later, set sail on our 3 week trip to the east coast & back. That's 12,000 miles in less than 2 months! Whew! I think I'll calm down for a while now.

Overall the experience was a good one. Sure, our Highlander would have been a more luxurious ride for 12 hour a day drives, day after day, but it was fun just the same. And of course the savings in gas was certainly a plus.

The only real downsides were as follows:
1) Both my wife & I had problems with back pain. Mine was lower back pain & I tried different seating positions during the drives to try to lessen the effect. Some days were better than others. Sure was wishing I could have unbolted my Highlander seats & taken them with us.
2) The occasional squirrelly steering on the freeway & being prone to knocking around with some side winds.

This second complaint was greatly helped, btw, with the addition of the spoiler & brace from BT Tech that I installed right before this east coast trip. I think the spoiler made the biggest difference with this Prius problem. Especially when it comes to speeds above 70mph.

I had also spent some bucks on a completely brand new stereo rig, adding a new head unit, speakers, amp, sub, b-quiet, XM Radio, etc (report in the stereo section of the forum to come soon). That certainly helped to pass the time on some of those marathon drives on the way out.

I've certainly honed my abilities to get good gas mileage on the freeways & in town & saw first hand the disparities in fuel prices from one state to another. My mileage varied from 42 on the low side to 56 on the high end. This is while going mostly 75 to 80 almost 75% of the way (the speed limit on most of I80 is 75 through the majority of the country). Of course I mellowed out to 60/65 occasionally. Also, much of this drive had lots of elevation climbs that would contribute to killing the mileage I was trying so hard to maintain.

Took this little black techie machine through places as diverse as Manhattan, Martha's Vineyard, Toronto, beautiful small fishing villages in Connecticut, Upstate New York, NJ, Salem & Boston MA, Badlands WY, Chicago, The Bridges of Madison County, Mt Rushmore, Devils Tower, and many more states & sites that I won't bore you any further to tell about.

One thing that was quite noticeable while traveling a lot of the country was how few Prius's I saw on the road. In a few larger towns I would see a small sprinkling, but overall I was one of the few out there on the roads I took. Maybe this was just bad timing or coincidence, or not.

I must tell you that most people I had talked to about this trip thought I was nuts driving a Prius for long distances. Even a few Toyota service guys thought it was weird, but I was overall satisfied, with the above caveats. If I was to do it again I would certainly look into some sort of seating upgrade or back support/foam/whatever. Still - it was a cool experience I'll not soon forget.

Cheers,
-Dave

 

Not really. It seemed to be about the same as far as I could tell. The one thing that was surprising about this car, when I first took it on a trip that had significant elevation increases, was how it seemed to have plenty of power to climb & was remarkably easy to pass from 65 to 85.

 

Agreed, Utah is one of my favorite places for red rock beauty other than Sedona AZ. We visited Bryce, Zion, Arches & Canyonlands national parks. My favorite of the bunch was Arches. Took some great pictures at each place & a few cool places along the way, like these.

[Broken External Image]:http://www.meniketti.com/images/arch1.jpg

[Broken External Image]:http://www.meniketti.com/images/d-arch.jpg

 

Tadashi, I'll look into the lumbar support threads. I also put lots of b-quiet in the 4 doors (2 layers) to help with road noise. It did make a difference, but I think it still could use a bit more quieting in the cabin. Not too sure what to do next.

Since you reminded me of the road noise issue, it brings up a point that I forgot about. While listening to the stereo & having to crank it up enough to mask the road noise when over real bad surfaces (like going over I80 near Tahoe), my ears would ache because of the lower mid/upper bass range that the cabin would resinate at over these rough surfaces. And this with ComforTreads that I purchased 3 days after buying the car. It needs a bit more work on this issue in my opinion. Of course, being a professional musician, and having been exposed to loud music for over 31 years, my ears are probably a bit more sensitive to the loud resonance of certain frequencies than the average person, but it does bother me at those times when the surfaces are bad.

By the end of the trip I decided to not let the stereo compete with the road noise in those extreme situations & would instead pop in the earplugs until the bad road surfaces went away.