Prius equivalent total mileage?

:welcome: i think it is reasonable. most of these cars are doing 150 to 200,000 miles without any major work. and when there is, it's the battery or inverter. don't hear much about the engine. all the best!

 

the engine mostly turns off at stoplights or as you're pulling up to a stoplight, so a prius with 200,000 miles probably had the engine on for 190,000 of those miles. It'll be even higher in he north as the engine tends not to shut off in cold winters to keep the engine and/or the passengers warm.

if the difference was 40% toyota would have put a meter like in boats that records how many hours the engine was running, not miles. Following the maintenance schedule for motor oil, tranaxle fluid and both engine & inverter coolant is all you need to achieve 250,000+ miles of service from a Prius, or any other Toyo for that matter.

 

I'd buy a Prius with 150K miles properly maintained with service records than one with 100K miles with no service history whatsoever.

 

The Prius is powered by gasoline burned in an internal combustion engine. It is a more efficient engine due to the electric portion of the Hybrid Synergy Drive allowing it to be tuned that way, but it's still an internal combustion engine. I doubt you could equate increased longevity to the fact it's a hybrid. You do get longer life on the brakes, due to regenerative braking.

I suspect the reason we get long engine life is because it's a Toyota. Not because it's a hybrid.

 

No. The electric motor is powered by the traction battery. The gasoline engine provides much of the power required to recharge the traction battery (some of the power comes from regenerative braking.)

Since the gasoline engine has to recharge the traction battery and some inefficiency is associated with the charging and discharging process, the gasoline engine performs approximately the same work that the electric motor did, along with a "tax" to account for heat and other efficiency losses.

The gasoline engine can operate more efficiently in a hybrid since it is smaller than a normal gasoline engine would be in a comparably-sized vehicle and also operates under Atkinson cycle instead of Otto cycle. The Atkinson cycle is more efficient but produces less low-end torque. The electric motor provides the low-end torque and supplemental power required under heavy acceleration.

Compare to a vehicle of conventional design which has a gasoline motor large enough to provide adequate freeway acceleration. Most of the time the motor is operating at a small fraction of maximum power output, but fuel economy is constrained due to the size of the engine (the larger the piston displacement, the higher the fuel consumption.)

That is why the Prius mpg is much better than normal vehicles of similar size.

 

This makes is sounds like the combustion engine does not drive the wheels directly, which in fact, it does. Maybe that's what was meant, but I got confused reading the post.

 

The gasoline engine and the electric motor can individually or collectively power the wheels via the power split device. The power split device is basically like a differential from a normal vehicle except that the engine and MG1 are connected (as power inputs) where the wheels would normally be while the output shaft is where the engine would normally be; and that is spun by MG2.

 

Unless you have a plugin, its useful to remember that ALL of the power used by a Prius is ultimately produced by the ICE. So in terms of actual "work" there is really no difference. Any gains in longevity are a function of increased efficiency and perhaps some gain from turning the engine off when stopped.

 

Perhaps. But in a non-hybrid, the engine continues running at stop lights, stop signs, and in stop-and-go traffic. So given a Prius with 200,000 miles and a non-hybrid with 200,000 miles each driven identically, the engine in the non-hybrid will certainly have been running longer than the Prius. I'm not sure if it is 40% longer, but I suspect it might be more than 5%.

Also, since the Prius uses MG1 to spin the engine up to nearly 1000 RPM and builds up oil pressure before lighting up fuel with spark, the engine starts on the Prius are not as hard on the engine as they are on non-hybrids.