Four months into the new car and I am really enjoying it. Certainly I would prefer to spend less time commuting and doing other useful things, but those be the breaks.
Lifetime mileage is still doing pretty well, right in the same sweet spot. I managed to get a 54 MPG tank (offset of course by a lousy 42 MPG tank - cold snap, lead foot or cheap gas - dunno).
Either way I still get to keep my hypermiler merit badge. On the operating cost side, my 42 MPG tank really socked it to me with a wicked outlier, but overall respectable.
I've just come up on 5000 miles and took the car into the shop today for its first scheduled service. I asked for the dino juice to be replaced with synthetic Mobile 1 5W/30. We'll see if that has any positive impact on efficiency. It should certainly lead to longer engine life and perhaps I can skip every other oil change - every 10k miles as opposed to every 5k miles per the manufacturer's schedule with cheap oil.
Are you counting total cost of ownership per mile? I've heard that gas costs are lower, but overall costs of Prius wipe out gas gains.
Posted by: Todd B. | April 22, 2008 at 04:52 PM
The cost per mile calculation here is strictly fuel cost. Longer term I may try to factor in the rest for some sort of TCO, whatever that may be.
Rough figuring, moving from a 16MPG to ~50MPG daily driver is nothing but gain :)
Posted by: Chris Staszak | April 22, 2008 at 08:41 PM