Doing my part for the economy!

PriusChat has been a great resource as I have been learning about my new Prius. I have about 1200 miles of experience with my Prius, and this site has been perfect when I wanted to know more. Far better than reading the manual - which I've done several times now!

The availability of the Prius Chat Store has helped me help the economy, too! I bought the shade for the onboard monitor, the shark-fin antenna, and a SGII based on what people had to say about these items here on the board.

B.F. Skinner (the operant conditioning psychologist) once said that if you want to modify behavior, quantify it. The onboard monitor and the SGII certainly have helped me relearn how to drive, but the suggestions and comments here at PriusChat have really been the motivation.

Even with just a thousand miles driven, I'm impressed with the car's technology in a new way every day. My best run so far is shown in my avatar. Sometime I hope to fill up the screen. (There must be some clever name for having all bars ≥100mpg.) My mean MPG seems a little low, but after reading plenty here, I can understand why that is. And actually, I've only filled up twice since I bought the car in mid-January, so I should probably be wary of making judgments based on my own admittedly small sample size

Aside from that, I'm still finding out new things here. Today, for example, I read in the SGII thread that the reason my SGII keeps shutting down is that I didn't set the fuel type as "hybrid".

I'd like to try the EV hack eventually, but I'm not that confident in my mechanical skills when it comes to cars. Maybe trying a few other things first will help. I've taken computers apart and put them back together successfully, so I don't know why this would be any different, but it feels different.

Anyway, thanks to PriusChat and the PriusChat posters for all of the great resources here.

 

The distance was in the 18-20 mile range. That's one thing I didn't think about noting at the time, but I was able to leverage Google maps for the estimate. That makes sense because I remember the average speed ranged from the low 30's mid 40s. The route was somewhat hilly with not much traffic, and I was able to get some pretty long glides in on the downhills while not worrying about holding anyone up during the uphills.

I don't have a long commute (about 11 miles r/t), and if I had a bike or a Vespa for the daily back and forth, I'd probably get better long-term mileage by only using the car for longer trips. I have a feeling that on most days, the Prius barely gets warmed up, then gets about a mile on Electric only and by then I'm at work.

Seems like the best trips I get so far MPGwise are the longer ones (>20 miles).