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Old 07-13-2005, 01:47 PM
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Schwa Schwa is offline
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Real Name: Erick
Location: Coquitlam, B.C.
Hybrids: 2001 Prius
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Default Re: Carbon measured as a part of EPA mpg Test

I see what you are saying, and I can see how that would skew the results somewhat, but it's actually quite hard to make a Prius use up all it's battery under that type of driving. More often than not the gas engine will come on to generate electricity so that the battery is not used at all. If you activated EV mode (not available to the EPA) then, yes it would be easy to drive around and use up the battery in a few minutes, no problem.

A bigger reason it may seem skewed is the amount of time spent idling -- a Prius will definately have a huge advantage there, whereas in real world driving people may not idle nearly as much, making it seem excessively high when compared to real world numbers.

The only real way to determine how skewed the tests are is the battery level difference, and there's no data at this time, as far as what I've seen. It would be interesting to know, for sure.

Last edited by Schwa; 07-13-2005 at 01:57 PM.
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