Sometimes, like the weekend drag strip enthusiasts and car rally drivers, you burn gas for amusement. Hybrid skeptics like to project false claims about one-dimensional hybrid owners as if we can't have fun. To heck with them, life is too short to not have a little fun. Chill out and enjoy the freedom. But if you want to do it in just commuting, there is a way.

Break it up into 4 hour segments, two per day, but keep the speed at 18-20 mph. Do one in the early morning and one in the late evening. That should come in at about 160 miles per day. That will take about 7 work days and be done with it.

But sometimes, you don't get to set the goals and others will declare something to be the standard. We can ignore it or take it as just another engineering challenge. Once 'put in the can,' we can move on or in my case, back to understanding the engineering characteristics of our cars. Then we can get back to the serious work of making these techniques automatic, the default behavior.

You need to understand that I personally don't put a whole lot of stock in these "whole tank" marathon efforts. What makes more sense would be a calibrated amount of gasoline, say 1 gallon or 4 liters, and then drive for distance and time. IMHO for a Prius, that should be ~100 miles and take about 5 hours. Then to normalize the data, the maximum payload would be used to calculate the payload - passenger efficiency, the seat miles. This would work for almost all of the vehicles and get us out of these "tank" marathons.

I have to admit a certain amount of amusement that only hybrids have been used for these marathon efforts. I'm amused because of claims that a non-hybrid can do as well as a hybrid but that is not what is being used.

Bob Wilson

Operation Iraqi Oil Freedom:

Automatic, stock, project car.

My other 1500 cc car:

Automatic, stock, backup car.
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