On my way out I heard the Toyota person who organized this event saying he was hoping to make this a re-occurring event. We will see. I haven't heard that in the future it will only be Prius. I do hope they include non-hybrid cars to keep us Prius drivers humble (more below).
It was definitely nice to see Wayne in person and listen to his excellent speech. Throughout the entire lecture he dotted so much commendation to Toyota in general and to Prius in particular that I think the sponsor have gotten a lot more than their money's worth back. The scholarship ceremony was a good publicity also.
One of the main reasons that I decided to go was to meet Hobbit and I was so glad I went. After almost all people had left Hobbit was still there and I had a chance to talk to him. Even though we had never met before he was friendly and patiently answered all of my questions which may have already been asked of him a thousand times.
Of course it was a big added bonus to meeting and talk with Neil and Jethro. I can't wait to see Neil's EV completes.
I had known about normalizing the MPG numbers with EPA numbers from an e-mail a few days before the event. So before the rally when I saw Neil's car in the lot at first and then Jethro's car pulling into the place I knew right at that moment that all of us Prius drivers were doomed. I can only admire their hypermiling skills.
I like Bob's "utility scale" but I wonder if the "EPA scale" would still be more suitable for evaluating driver skills? The rally itself is rather informal so we shouldn't take the numbers too seriously. For example all of us Prius drivers were encouraged by Wayne himself to "cheat" a little by force charging before the run. (He did mention that it's wasting fuel but just to make the numbers look better for the rally.) He even walked to each car to make sure we know how to force charge. (By the way it was nice of him standing in the middle of the road at the starting point directing traffic and waving each of us off.) Another thing was some of the guys at the finishing booth weren't trained well and took the mileage off the MFD (only shows integers) as opposed to the trip meter (shows 0.1 mile interval). Here is a histogram of trip miles that I back calculated from the numbers on the board for all Prius cars.
Hobbit's GPS measurement were 24.3 miles and we see a nice distribution around that. All the 6 cars that had 24.0 miles logged were probably human error. Also as Hobbit pointed out on such a short loop the variation in the luck that each driver gets with the traffic lights also makes enough a difference in the final MPG numbers. So even though I pegged the MFD MPG at the rally (my own PC program which usually matches the MFD pretty well showed 102.? IIRC, I wish I had taken pictures but the guys were hurrying me off the finishing booth), it was somewhat unfairly helped by force charging the HV battery in the beginning and exhausting it at the end, and maybe some luck with the traffic lights and traffic conditions in general.
Here is a picture of the cars from a slightly different angle:
We were given these humongous flags to mark our cars that must have added some non-trivial air resistance. My side window deflector prevented the flag being installed upright and the best I could do is to put it ~45 degrees at the rear end of the rear window. Now I think of it I wonder why side window deflectors don't seem very popular around here.
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