Ugly? I think the Prius looks pretty cool in its current incarnation. If Toyota's next version of the Prius is as radical a departure as their previous makeover, it should be flying saucer shaped.

 

i personally don't mind the look but the majority of people say its fugly looking (mostly the younger age group)

 

I'm 25 and I think the back half of the Prius looks great but the front half is ugly. I feel the opposite about the new Civic.

 

That is interesting idea about the GPS Nasagineer. What kind of GPS unit do you have? Does it use DGPS or some other form of correction or satellite filtration? I was just wondering because I have compared a couple of units in the field and found that some are more accurate than others.

 

Thank you for your earlier post CGameProgrammer about the trip mpg. I have noticed (what I feel are) unrealistic fluctuations in my 06 trip A mpg as well. I am sorry to hear it is also happening to you, but glad to hear I am not the only one.

Ever experienced a similar problem or “calibration” with your real time mpg display as I do?

 

hm its just the limitations of gas tanks! honestly there was a device on the market that showed you how much L your consuming a /min/hour. I think that's the RIGHT way to measure fuel economy. You can just see that number climb or go lower with anything you do (turn on cd, ac, floor it, idle in N). I'd get it but the device doesn't work for hybrid cars... and I can live with a L/100km display. I don't even have any on my car! All i know is I average 6.5/100km everytime.

 

I'm using a Garmin GPS-III Plus handheld. No differential GPS. It's true that DGPS will give you better positional accuracy, but even without it, I think the speed numbers are pretty good since they are only measuring the rate of change of the position.

 

I had my first experience driving my hybrid in the rain tonight. 60-65 MPH plus a 5 MPH headwind resulted in 41.7 MPG for my drive home!!

 

same, my first day driving the 06 hch in the rain too

47.0 mpg, 55-65 mph with light traffic, not too bad. i was driving with the load though (accelerate downhill, slow uphill)

 

On the subject of GPS, I did a 1925 mile roadtrip from Phoenix to Boulder and back to Phoenix for Thanksgiving weekend. I have a Garmin GPSMAP 76S which does use WAAS to improve the GPS accuracy. Daytime accuracy is listed around 12-15 feet most of the time and at night it improves to 7-9 feet or so, which is awesome considering the standard claim for WAAS GPS is 3 meters (9.8 feet).

At any rate, most all cars will read a bit high on the speedometer, especially between 40 and 90 mph. This is on purpose for two reasons. First, European regulations require that the speedometer never underreport, period. As such, they just make it wildly optimistic, typically by at least 5mph. Most Euro cars, even in the US market has the speedo calibrated as such. Second, I think car makers just want people to think their cars are faster than they really are. Either that or they want people to think "My car is so great I can do 70mph and it feels like I'm only doing 55!" Well surprise, you were really doing 65mph anyway.

The thing that's important though is that in spite of my own car being off by about 3.5 to 4mph at highway speed, the trip and main odometer measured within 1% accurate both for each individual trip segment between fillups and for the entire trip overall. In other words, the GPS reported 965 miles and both the sum of the trip odometer resets and the main odometer math worked out to about 955 miles each way. Considering that even the tread depth of your tires and slight tire deformation as speed increases can affect your reported velocity by 0.5 to 1%, it's pleasantly accurate. This is important to me because I like the confidence of reporting my distances and fuel economy accurately and knowing the odo is within 1% is nice.