Road Trip in the new Prius

I just completed a 2000 plus mile road trip with my fairly new Prius to attend a funeral in Rhode Island. We live in Florida and drove to SC to pick up 2 other family members before continuing on up thru New York and on to Rhode Island.

The Prius performed beyond my expectations. We averaged 46.72 MPG over the entire trip, running 74 MPH most of the time while on the open road and used the Navigation system extensively although we went against its advice and ended up in downtown New York City when my son in law went against her wishes. We changed drivers after he got us in trouble and I used the nav system to guide us to the Lincoln Tunnel and we were out of the city within 15 minutes. Good thing it was late in the evening, and not rush hour!

While the nav system has some nice features such as the lane guidance, I think I prefer my hand held Garmin GPS. It is very difficult to tell what city you are in or highway names and sometimes the routes she picked would have taken us way out of our way. I had to learn to use the add waypoint feature to make her take the roads I wanted to use while on our return trip and she would have been useless were it not for the Lockpick 3 from Coastaletech. My wife even learned to use nav system since I did most of the driving. We used the nav system to locate places to eat along the route and enjoyed watching the estimate times rise and fall as we made stops along the way and then made up time once we got back under way.

We also made phone calls while under way, again thanks to the Lockpick 3 which allowed us to input the phone numbers while driving. Using Google 411 (A great tool!), we called for information on our return trip to locate Paula Deans in Savannah Georgia. Using the text message it sent back to our phone, we input the street address (while underway) and got new routing directions for the detour into Savannah.

To get the great gas mileage we got, I took heed of this forum and carefully aired my tires to the recommended pressures before the trip.

We encountered quite a bit of rain on our return trip. The semi trucks spray was most annoying. I looked in the rear view mirrors to see what kind of spray the Prius was making and discovered it barely generates much spray at all, thanks to its aerodynamic design and fender wells I suppose. With four adults in the car, we did not experience much turbulance from passing trucks, which was something I was a bit concerned about prior to taking the trip. And yes, we were being passed even though we were pushing 74 MPH in a 65 zone. I swear, you would have thought the speed limit was 95 MPH the way most people drive. I was afraid to drive the speed limit because of people coming up on me so fast. A few times, I was in the process of passing a string of trucks and had people come up on me and flash their lights at me even though I was doing well over the speed limit, actually one of those times I was doing 85 in order to try to get out of the way before they ran up on me.

The Prius gas bladder is my only complaint. Just before we were ready to leave on our trip, I went to fill it up with 404 miles already driven. The bladder would only accept 3.5 gallons of fuel which I knew was not right. I could not squeeze another drop into it, and then when I started the car, the fuel guage went up to the last pip which again did not seem right. I stopped for fuel again 182 miles later. That time it took a full 8.5 gallons. Go figure! From then on, it worked properly so I don't know what the heck was going on with it at the start of the trip. It had never done that before and has not done it since.