Quote:
Originally Posted by Caddylackn
His gas mileage dropped to under 20 mpg when he was over 100 mph.
He could use a few aero mods. Wouldn't take much to see benefits in mpg at 100 mph.
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You may have misunderstood some facts from the video. Can see how the confusion exists. Let me help clear that up a bit. On my first run during the musketball i ran basically wide open for extended amounts of time. The gen4 Prius tops out at 115. Can briefly get it to 116 even 117 under certain conditions but it quickly settles down to the electronically limited 115. During a 6 hour section of that run i managed to drive 648 miles. It was during that segment i learned that a prius at speeds of 110-115 gets horrible mpg. Best i can estimate is 21 mpg. Drop those speeds down by 10 to 100-105 and it gets low 30’s. With 102 hp available and at 115 mph, the engine is basically maxed out hence the low economy. For the recent record run i did consider aero mods. Did some test runs with the passenger mirror removed and it did slightly improve the economy at 100. But i just didnt feel comfortable without it it those speeds so it was left for safety. The only other mods i seriously considered was rear fender skirts. It could have possibly improved the economy but at what cost? Decided the time to build it and add it, plus the loss of stealth just wasn’t worth the effort. Stealth is an important part of doing a run like this. It was a cost versus benefit decision to leave the car as stock and plain looking as possible. Aero mods work for hypermiling and work well. But the effort involved for my purposes would have been of little benefit. For example, say i spent many hours doing multiple aero mods and lets toss some hypothetical numbers out. Say it improved my economy by 10%. Which is a very high number to gain for this car but i digress. Used 90 gallons on my run. Could have lowered it to a theoretical 81 gallons using that 10% improvement math. I would have still needed the third fuel tank to ensure i made it with stopping for fuel. See my point? Now with all that being said, ill reveal that plans are being made for a run in October of next year in which aero mods will be of huge benefit. Ill make a separate post on that in the near future as the ecomodder community could be of assistance with ideas for the run.