Prius Trip Report

I got back last night from a LONG trip in my new Prius. My wife and I drove 2,171 miles from San Jose, CA, through Oregon to Tacoma and Kirkland in WA, and then to Nampa, ID and finally back home. We drove over several mountain passes: the Siskiyous, Snoqualmie (WA), Owyhees (in ID), Blue Mountains (OR), and finally the granddaddy: Donner in CA. And there were numerous other passes. For example, Highway 95 from McDermitt to Winnemucca in Northern Nevada has a couple of ridges. We did this starting on Aug 9 and arriving back home on Aug 20. But there were only four days of concentrated driving interspersed with a bit of city driving here and there.

The Prius performed flawlessly over all of it. I was worried when we were approaching Donner that the SOC of the battery was persistently low (do not know why: the heat and AC, the altitude, what?). I monitored the SOC over the entire pass, and, while it once got to one pink bar, the system took power from the battery when it had to while returning charge every chance it got. And we got over the mountain in pretty good shape. I never felt like I couldn't maintain speed or accelerate up to speed when necessary. So I am very impressed with the performance of the car on this trip. BTW: on the way down, I finally saw all green bars! First time ever for that for me.

The real test will be climbing Donner from the West, since that's a rise from sea level to 7000+ feet, where the Eastbound trip starts at about 5000 feet and goes to 7300.

I got a chance to use the Fastrak transponder over the Benicia bridge, and that worked OK, and let me bypass a bunch of traffic waiting to hand-pay the toll. So hurray for Fastrak and HOV lane stickers!

Even though I pretty much know this whole route, I used the Nav guidance throughout. It mostly did what I hoped, and gave me a chance to learn a bit more about how it works. I am a longtime Garmin GPS user, and so I've had to reduce some of my expectations and unlearn some things to use this Nav system effectively. But I also had my Garmin 60C along for capturing the tracklog of the whole trip, and fell back on it a time or two for finding restaurants.

It galls me that finding a place to eat while moving is virtually impossible. We did succeed in finding a place for lunch in Prosser, WA that I would never have found on my own using the Nav, but we had to be parked to do it.

On our approach into the Bay Area on 80, we heard about two messes slowing things down through Fairfield, so I used the detour feature to re-set the guidance to take us on I-5 to 205 to 580 to 680, which is a route I've used often and know well. And I was impressed at how slickly the detour feature worked. But there also was a problem: for some reason, the system was insisting on taking us in on 880 instead of 680. This is not optimal even if by some conceivable notion it is shorter (but I'm pretty sure it was not). I had a terrible time convincing it that I wanted to stay on 680, and finally suspended the guidance altogether.

Another issue with the Nav is that the estimate of the arrival time appears to be based on the overall average speed for the entire trip, rather than a moving average. So if you have to go 55 for 100's of miles on the first portion of the trip and can then go 75 (through NV), you get a pretty conservative estimate of your arrival time. A moving average would be better. At least I wish I had a choice of those two methods; I could then bracket the arrival time pretty accurately.

While on this trip, I kept track of the other Prii I saw, whether on the road or in town. My final count is 28, but one or two of them might have been double counted by seeing them twice. Anyway, if I saw any of you, consider yourself waved at!

So, the final mileage was: 49.8 MPG for the whole trip (I reset the mileage tally at the beginning and then didn't touch it until arriving at home). I also calculated it from the miles traveled (2172.1) and the total gas used (42.471 gal) and got 49.96 mpg, which I consider amazingly close, so I think I can trust the car's tally. I'm very happy that I achieved just 1 mpg lower than the EPA estimate for highway driving without any special effort to stretch things. I drove the limit (and sometimes a little more for passing on hills) whether the limit was 55 or 75, and the car just kept on cranking and saving the gas. I would have used over 2 times the amount in the Jeep Grand Cherokee that the Prius displaced. So I'm definitely a happy camper!

All in all, a fun trip that confirmed all over again to me what a great car this is.