Prius Ice Capades

As monday dawned a buddy and I loaded up my Prius to head up into the Colorado mountains to do some ice fishin'. I volunteered to drive because I wanted to see how the car would handle the mountains. How would it handle the grades and what would the MPGs look like?

I was pleasently surprise to see that I was able to eek out 41.4 MPG on a trip from Westminster, CO (suburb or Denver) to Kremling, CO (on the way to Steamboat Springs). That involved a lot of driving up, followed by some down and then a lotta rolling terrain. The poor batter was drained and then stuffed full. The SOC was all over the place because of the elevation changes. The temps, BTW, were between 8 and 20 degrees for the majority of this leg of the trip.

Heading back down to denver, we got stuck in the snow trying to leave the lake. Fortunately, a guy on a snow mobile came by and lent a hand. We were able to get the car most of the way up the hill (the snow was very hard packed and about 4-6 in deep) but we couldn't get 'er to go any further. Luckily somebody in a Jeep Cherokee saw us wallowing in the snow and he had a tow strap. Got to use the tow attachment for the first time. It works. The guy had no trouble pulling us the remaining 10 feet.

The way home was typical colorado skii weekend madness. A lot of stop and go and parking lot until we crossed back over the continental divide. Then the hypermileage began. Since it's pretty much all downhill for 80 miles and the traffic was REALLY heavy and not really exceeding 20-30 mph I put 'er in EV mode. I was in EV mode for about 50 miles... seriously. The consumption screen was hilarious. nothing but 99.9 MPG bars all the way across the screen. The other interesting thing about this part of the trip as that I was able to exceed 34 mph in EV mode. At one point I-70 opened up to about 45-50 mph and the car never kicked out of EV mode. I didn't have to touch the accelerator because of the steep grade, I was mainly shifting between B and D (B is great on the down slopes, BTW) with frequent light braking. The battery was stuffed like a xmas goose so I was trying to stay off of the brake pedal as much as I could. It was fun to really push EV mode, accelerating as hard as I could and just not caring about the SOC. It stayed green for an age!

The trip totalled 261 mi (on a new tank) and I was able to finish up at 49.5 MPG round trip. Not too shabby.

 

Oh, I know. I was just trying to minimize brake pad wear. It would be embarassing if I had to get my brake pad replaced before 200K.

 

Hee hee. I won't tell. Yeah, I can imaging on the windswept plains that it might be rather unpleasant just standing around in the open. We were a wee bit chilly in the morning when the temps were floating around 10-15. It was OK as long as the wind was slack. A couple of squalls came through and dumped a little snow on us and the wind chill dipped noticably. Good fishing though.