To my surprise my recent Avis rental was a blue Toyota Prius. This was actually the first time I’d driven a hybrid vehicle and I must say it was pretty cool. A few things really stand out about the Prius:
1. When you start the car, it literally make no noise when you are idling. Pretty weird at first b/c you feel like you did not start the car.
2. Prius has a really nice, roughly 9 inch touchscreen display for audio, climate and other info. The “other info” part is pretty cool — it shows you a visual animation of the car, its 4 wheels, electric motor, battery and piston engine. And arrows move among these parts showing whether the electric motor is on, piston engine is doing its thing, and if the wheels are moving. It also shows whether power is being consumed by the battery or given back to the battery. Power is given back to the battery when breaking or coasting.
3. My average gas mileage so far is reading 42 miles/gallon of gas. However, I suspect it is actually much higher. I’ve heard of some ”Prius freaks” getting 100 miles/gallon by driving in certain controlled ways.
My next car will probably be a standard hybrid or plug-in hybrid. Only wish they could improve the battery life and reduce the replacement cost. Rumor is that the lithium ion battery pack will last about 10 years, is very expensive to replace and degrades over time (much like a laptop battery does as cycles of charge and discharge increase). Of course the world does not “really” know yet, since hybrids have only been around for about a decade now. This sort of reminds me about people who say after 50 years of using a mobile phone up to your ear you will get brian cancer (we won’t really know until about another 35 years!).
Guess we will all find out soon enough … about hybrid batteries and the brain cancer that is. Peace.
