On the way to work today, I hit 80,000 miles on my 2004 Prius!
I snapped a couple pics as it changed over.
A little math…
80,000 miles at an average of, let’s say 46 MPG (it tends to be around that), that works out to about 1,739 gallons of gas. Damn, that’s a lot of gas! Not sure what the average price of gas has been over the past few years, let’s say $2, that works out to about $3,478 in gas.
If I’d had a lower MPG car, let’s say 25 MPG, the gas would have been $6,400.
So the Prius’ higher MPG has been a savings of $2,922 so far.
Plus the emissions are lower on the Prius, so there’s that, too.
I’ve had the car for 5 years, so that’s 16,000 miles a year, or 43.84 miles per day.
Which about matches my daily commute, so no surprise there.
I’ve already paid it off, so here’s hoping I can get another 5 years out of it!
Damn, my Toyota only gets 18.6 MPG with winter gas and about 19.5 MPG with summer gas. Of course that is at 6,400 feet above sea level where cars do not run as efficiently.
You should get a Scanguage II for the Prius. I installed one in the Toyota Double Cab and it is great if you have to know every statistic like me. It basically ties into the OBD port for the car computer and tracks pretty much everything in your engine that has an input to the computer. Mine is set up to read Horsepower, % load on the engine, air intake temperature, coolant temperature, ignition timing, MPH, MPG, RPM, throttle position. It also tells you your fuel economy for that drive, day, previous day, tank, lifetime. It also tells you how many hours, miles, days, gallons, etc. to empty. You can also track all the stats as a Max and average reading for that drive, day, previous day, lifetime, etc. So If I get pulled over and the cop says I’m doing 60, I can show him the display and that my max speed for that given commute was only 55. The color of the display can be blended using red, green , blue to match the display of your vehicle. One of these days I’m going to get in an accident while reading the display. Mine is located above the rear view mirror using an after market bracket. I ran the CAT 5 wiring under the headliner and behind the A-pillar and plugged it in below the dash.
Jared Kaber
I thought about that, but the Prius uses a different system (CAN?) instead of OBD, so there aren’t as many hookups available for it… but last time I looked was when I got the car, maybe by now there are more available.
I read on some forums that people are using the Scanguage II with their Prius. They probably make additional cables. When you order it, you give them make and model of the car. It is a pretty cool gadget for $150.
I got you beat by over 100K on my 2002 Prius and still going strong.