Bob this is not strictly true. First of all I'm not a Honda advocate. I like the Prius every bit as much as I like any Honda car. I don't really care for Honda's belt and pulley CVT. If I had to choose between a Honda Civic CVT and a Prius 2 I'll likely take the Prius. You can compare a Prius to a CVT HCH if you like but the comparison is meaningless to me because I favor the Prius already anyways.

My beef is with people who insist the the Prius is better than my car (MT HCH). People who start spouting terms like "full hybrid" and spout off EPA figures even though they themselves are not getting EPA figures. I consider my car roughly equal to the Prius.

The MT HCH is rated 46/51 and the average in the database is 48.2 which is above the lower EPA figure and just about exactly what the EPA combined mileage is. It seems to me like Honda designed and tested the MT HCH to be driven in real world conditions. The way all the numbers agree within a few tenths seems very honest to me.

OTOH the way the Prius 2 database numbers falls far short of the Prius 2 EPA figures seem a little fishy to me....I've speculated that Toyota designed the Prius to maximize the EPA tests but I have no idea if that is actually true. I prefer the database to the EPA figure because the database seems more "real world" to me. I'm not trying to insult Toyota or the Prius, only pointing out data that all are free to check for themselves and speculating on the reason for the Prius descrepancy between the database and EPA.