66 mpg 2009 Totoya Prius, Champrius 4.0 Under Construction now

[Talos Woten]

Originally Posted by ps2fixer

Always good to look at all options, I'm huge anti debt for the way I live, so the only way I'd replace a vehicle is if I could afford to buy it out right with no loans. Save a ton of insurance, no interest, older car plates are cheaper. Generally older cars also have cheaper insurance as they are safer too. My 1997 Corolla was cheaper insurance with 2 air bags than my 2006 Prius. Insurance company owner told me it's because there's more metal in the corolla and there's less chance of getting hurt in a wreck.

I'm actually very similar in philosophy. I decided a long time ago to never buy a new car and always get used ones. The price to performance ratio is just so much better, if one is willing to accept occasional service outages. The second big decision was to never own a home or property. Not having a mortgage allowed me to travel the world and have many great experiences. The third big decision was to retire early. I'm far happier living modestly on a fixed income than I ever was on my hamster wheel running the rat race.

[ps2fixer]

Yea I'm similar, but I like to own my stuff. I hate debt though, my house was the only real loan I've had and I worked with the owner so 0% interest for the first 5 years, paid it off in 4 years and the last year I went self employed and income was way lower.

Since I'm self employed full time (since 2013), it feels about like I'm retired, but I still "work" on things. I enjoy most parts about my work though. I used to work a "normal" job before, first one was a bit boring but it was midnights. Other job was in the health industry and that company was ran terribly, everyone was over worked and overly stressed out. After I quit the business was sold like 3 months later and my whole department was fired.

Anyway, I hope to retire early, only mid 30's right now, but I have some money saved up and investments and such. If all goes well my retirement should be paid for at 65+ if the investments perform as expected and inflation doesn't eat it all up, but I have to pay my way from now to 65 with what I have currently. Hopefully my business scales up well and eventually have people work for me and I can focus on more of the fun aspects of the business which is also the niche thing most people don't want to invest time into.

I've done enough traveling picking up junker/scrap cars, vacations are fine, but I never really got too big into just traveling to travel, too many other things weigh on my mind that I could be doing instead of traveling I guess.

[oil pan 4]

Sounds like you need lots of header wrap or maybe the catalyst just needs to go bye bye.
Too much belly pan has caused cooked wires, fried sensors, gas tank boiling for other people.

[Talos Woten]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

Sounds like you need lots of header wrap or maybe the catalyst just needs to go bye bye.
Too much belly pan has caused cooked wires, fried sensors, gas tank boiling for other people.

Hehe. I was actually one of those "other people" on my first version. I naively covered everything up on my first go around and started cooking the interior cabin. I got super lucky that I did it in the Fall and found out about it in Winter. I think that if I had done it in Spring... it would have been adios Champrius.

This time around I left the original airflow mostly intact:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CfHZAqXFjB3/
So air has a continuous path from the engine bay to exit in front of the gas tank, just like the Toyota engineers intended. The only thing I changed was the flow to the wheels. They had channels that 10% of the air would use to deflect in front of each of the rear wheels. But that snakes around a lot of the underbody as well. So I decided to seal all the off and dump all the air in the center.

Something else I'm proud of is that I left the pipe exposed. When you look at the stock underside, the pipe is clearly below the belly pans (see attached pic.) In earlier designs I covered that up, and it slowly cooked the plastic. In v4.0, I've decided the engineers probably wanted it exposed to airflow to cool it or somesuch, so I've left it alone and continued the belly pan underneath it.

[ps2fixer]

You could use metal screen over the exhaust, I think that's how areo civic was done, but it's a long time since I looked through the thread.

Build thread:

https://ecomodder.com/forum/showthre...1-0-a-290.html

[Talos Woten]

Originally Posted by ps2fixer

You could use metal screen over the exhaust, I think that's how areo civic was done, but it's a long time since I looked through the thread.

Build thread:

https://ecomodder.com/forum/showthre...1-0-a-290.html

Right now the cats are covered by two cat shields made out of aluminum. Those seem perfect, since they are actually designed to withstand the heat. If I were to ever cover the muffler, it would be with something similar, i.e. a thick sheet of aluminum. But at this point I'm not certain I would even gain that much from it.

I used to use chicken wire over air inlets, but this new design doesn't have any on the underside. And I've learned the benefit of leaving outlets open to clear water and debris.

[Talos Woten]

Howdy all!

Champrius has reached another milestone; she just topped 55 mpg on my standard benchmark run.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CfrnG34FE0n/

Moreover, things have gotten spicy. I have a gentleman's wager how much modifying the front of a car will gain in gas mileage. I believe I can get 8+ more mpg, whereas aerohead has called me out and said flatly there's no way I'll even gain 4. You can see the evolution of the bet here if you are interested:
https://ecomodder.com/forum/showthre...tml#post670114

So if I can get 65+ mpg consistently I'll win the wager, whereas if I'm stuck below 60 mpg then I'll bow to aerohead's oracular wisdom. In the middle it might be too close to call because of testing error.

It's raining all this week where I am, so I'll be focusing exclusively on the front starting next week. The race is on!

Here's the current list of mods for the car that bring it from 39.2 mpg to 55.6:

DELETE: +% mpg gain [cost, time]
1.5% Rear and Passenger seats [$10, 2 hrs]
1.0% ~1/3 of the interior, spare wheel, jack, etc. [$10, 4 hrs]
1.0% Antenna [$0, 1 hr]
1.0% Rear Windshield Wipers [$10, 2 hrs]
0.5% Rear spoiler [$0, 2 hrs]

REPLACE:
4.0% Tiny side mirrors, added vortex generators [$40, 4 hrs]
3.5% Smooth moon hubcaps from pizza pans [$100, 6 hrs]
2.0% Low rolling resistance tires [$400/80k, 2 hrs]
0.0% Max tire pressure 44 psi [$0, 10 min] (safer to say we lose FE for underinflated)
0.5%+ Hood insulation (better colder / short trips) [$50, 2 hrs]
0.5% Gas Cap, Radiator Cap [$30/100k, 20 mins]
0.5% Air Filter [$20/30k, 15 mins]
0.5% Synthetic oil [$80/10k, 2 hrs] with oil catch can [$40, 4 hrs]
0.?% LED lighting (inside, headlights, etc.) [$70, 2 hrs]

ADD:
15.0% Full 42" boat tail with tail box [$450+, 18 hrs]
3.0% Windshield wiper deflectors [$40, 2 hrs]
3.0% Dual Cat Shields [$300, 8 hrs]
2.5% Wheel fairings (partial skirts for easy maintenance) [$50, 4 hrs]
2.5% Mid pan [$50, 8 hrs] + Rear Diffuser [$75, 6 hrs]
0.0% Shrouded ceiling vent + signal booster [$200, 4 hrs]
0.0% Solar Panel as partial Kammback (superceded by tail) [$500, 6 hrs]

[ps2fixer]

Figured it's worth a mention, us ecomodders that don't have an insta account can't see your posts/updates as it requires a login.

I think 4mpg is doable, 8mpg might be pushing it for the front end mods unless you're counting stock front vs adding grill block and such. With a grill block I'm sure there's improvements, but I don't think there's much to gain on the prius in that area. Air dam all the way down to the road, wheel splats, wiper deflectors. If you go extreme, you could try to reconstruct the shape of the nose, but I don't think it's too bad of a shape stock.

Either case, will be interesting to see how things turn out (or read since I haven't even seen a pic of the car yet lol)

[Talos Woten]

Originally Posted by ps2fixer

Figured it's worth a mention, us ecomodders that don't have an insta account can't see your posts/updates as it requires a login.

I think 4mpg is doable, 8mpg might be pushing it for the front end mods unless you're counting stock front vs adding grill block and such. With a grill block I'm sure there's improvements, but I don't think there's much to gain on the prius in that area. Air dam all the way down to the road, wheel splats, wiper deflectors. If you go extreme, you could try to reconstruct the shape of the nose, but I don't think it's too bad of a shape stock.

Either case, will be interesting to see how things turn out (or read since I haven't even seen a pic of the car yet lol)

That's odd. My account is public and my posts are global. Anyone should be able to view them.

I just went to my account from a fresh browser and was able to view everything just fine. Try my main Instagram account and see if that works:
https://www.instagram.com/kimlumbard/

I'm redoing the whole front end, including: a new air ducted inlet for the radiator, shaping as much of the outlet as I can, a much curvier and pointier nose, air curtains, and my secret special sauce. No worries if you are in the doubting camp with aerohead... prepare to be amazed in a few weeks.

I've attached a pic from the tail end, which was the last major mod I completed. Once I get the front done, I'll take some posterity pics and post them on Instagram and here.

[ps2fixer]

Here's what I see at that link. Try a private browsing window, that will clear login cookies and such.



I'm not completely in the doubter camp, I do think there's gains to be had, but ~8-10% or so is quite a lot. I remember there was a challenge a while back where a team drove a prius for a whole tank and hit a crazy tank average like 100mpg. I don't recall if it was a stock car or not, it was driven at more ideal speeds (25-30mph average I think), no radio, windows up, hot day, etc.

Didn't realize you had a full boat tail and such. You could easily hit those goals with slower speeds =). I'm running a nearly stock prius 45mph and for any kind of longer trip I'm hitting 55mpg or so, just have a grill block and missing a couple bell pan panels lol.

It looks like you live more in the city, I suspect it's more shorter trips for the car and such. You could probably see some big gains from a block heater, trans heater, etc. My MPG is horrible when the car is cold. It starts off around 30-35mpg and climbs at 40mph. There's also a mod to spoof the temp sensor to help get it to turn the engine off a bit sooner and such, I haven't messed with it but read about it. It currently takes my car around 6-7 miles to come up to temp.