Daox's Grey 2004 Prius

[Daox]

Originally Posted by mechman600

Now you have to nerd out on figuring out FE savings from running ultra-high tire pressures vs. The tire it ended up costing you!

Since the tire has about 1/8" of tread left plus quite a bit of cracking. I'm going to chalk it up to pretty much all savings and no cost.

[RedDevil]

Originally Posted by mechman600

Now you have to nerd out on figuring out FE savings from running ultra-high tire pressures vs. The tire it ended up costing you!

That's assuming it was caused by high pressure and nothing else.

Did the canvas really break from high pressure (still say 4 times lower than what it can handle anew) or from residual damage from hitting a rock, pothole or curb hard or running them flat?

imho it is not constant force that kills tires, but rather extreme thread bending that happens in the latter.

[Daox]

No idea how the damage happened. I assume mostly its old age. These tires have been on the car ever since I've gotten it. They are pretty cracked up and I'm guessing pretty old.

[Daox]

I finally ordered a new set of tires. There are some decent deals going on around the 4th. I ended up going with Continental Truecontact tires from tirerack. They were $69 each and a $70 rebate with purchase of 4, so a bit over $200 shipped. I'll have a local shop mount and balance them. I'm really looking forward to having a set of LRRs on the car. Its been quite some time since having a nice set of tires on it. Right now its a mish-mash of different tires.

[California98Civic]

Wow, almost 10 months since you posted in this thread! Might be longer since I last posted in mine, tho I am working on that car some (mostly dealing with wife and daughter's cars though). Did you look at Nokian WRG4 before buying? Just curious.

[Daox]

Yeah, I don't really drive the Prius very much as it is my wife's primary car. She doesn't put many miles on it either. So, I don't see much benefit to modding it beyond what is already done.

I did not look at the Nokian tires. I just looked through tire rack and discount tire for some good rated LRR tires. These were a good deal, so I nabbed them. My next choice on the list was going to be Hankook Kinergy ST tires. I may try them on my Mirage though.

[mpg_numbers_guy]

IIRC the Bridgestone Ecopias and Michelin Energy Savers were tested to be best for fuel economy on the Prius, outperforming other LRR tires by close to 2 mpg, and non LRR tires by more.

My dad drives various Honda CRVs as demo cars from work, and over several different cars and thousands of miles, the Ecopias return about 10% better fuel economy over any other brand tire. He hasn't driven one with Michelins though, so that might break the statistic.

[California98Civic]

Originally Posted by mpg_numbers_guy

IIRC the Bridgestone Ecopias and Michelin Energy Savers were tested to be best for fuel economy on the Prius, outperforming other LRR tires by close to 2 mpg, and non LRR tires by more...

It's worth pointing out that these two are the companies making LRR tires that get the best LRR ratings in the EU tire rating system. But right there alongside them in Europe is a Nokian LRR tire. All the others pale in comparison. I think people in the USA interested in LRR tires might wanna experiment with Nokians when/if the price is right relative to the better known Bridgestones and Michelins. Currently I am on a used pair of old Firestone LRRs and a pair of non-name, non LRR tires. They came with my 12 lb MINI rims with a lot of tread left. So I am running them out. Better tires would be awesome, but it ain't green or economical to trash perfectly good tires.

[Daox]

Time for a smallish update on the Prius.

I recently replaced the 12V battery. I had looked into alternatives, but with the cold weather we get here and it being my wife's car I decided to just get an OEM style AGM battery ($200) instead of going lithium or something.

However, when I opened things up in the back of the Prius, I found water... a lot of water.







This is actually a few inches of water in the battery compartment!





So I did some digging online and found that this actually isn't uncommon. There is a crack that develops at the top corner of the hatch and you get water in your trunk.










Thankfully, the fix for this is pretty simple. Grab a tube of silicon and smear it around the crack. Simple enough so I got a tube of silicon and a new battery and went to work.

So I pulled everything out of the rear of the car. Here is the spare tire well. It had about an inch of water after removing the tire. Thankfully the rubber drain plugs are easy to pop out and it drains out easily. I toweled it down and left the hatch open in the sun for it to dry off.





Here is the battery compartment. There was 3-4 inches of water in it! Again, there is a drain plug and I drained the water out of it that way.





Next up was the fix for the leak. I popped up the rain channel cover (very easy since it was plyable from sitting in the sun) and found how far the crack went. I cleaned up the area very well with rubbing alcohol because silicon is picky about what it sticks to and you need as clean of a surface as possible. Then I just smeared a thin layer over the crack and surrounding area with my finger. I did this to both sides of the hatch corners as the other side was cracked as well.

According to info I found online this fix does it pretty well. Thus far I haven't found any additional water in the back.

[Xist]

Did you hose it down for science?

Think of all of that extra weight she was hauling around!