philmcneal,

Fair enough. I'm used to performing regular maintenance on my K&N filters. I've used them on my previous vehicles, as well as motorcycles. Honestly, I didn't think it was that much effort at all cleaning and re-oiling the filters, but working for a dealer, I'm sure you've seen some real messes roll in!

I do have to question your recommendation of filling up the air in the tires until you can't stand it. We're not talking about a prius with a curb weight well under 2700 lbs. We're talking about a real life SUV with a curb weight of around 6000 lbs. Fully loaded, a max of over 7500 pounds.

While you are giving great advice for Prius owners, some of it may not apply to us SUV folk. I think we can both agree that the single most important thing for tire pressure is to make sure they are properly inflated. While I wouldn't resist raising the tire pressue to within the manufacturers recommendations, over-inflating is an entirely different scenario.

 

Jake it really depends on your driving style too!

for the prius, its using tires that are designed for corolla curb weight size (which is around 2400 lbs) the prius before I sit in the car is almost 3000 lbs so there already is a penalty for the tires. For the Corolla its 30 psi however for the prius its 35 front and 33 rear, IMO though that's just not enough to offset the 600 lb penalty and its cargo.

For the SUVS, they were bumped only 2 psi all the tires to eek its efficency and the extra weight added to the SUV's were only 300 lbs after the hybrid upgrade, so its not as drastic, plus with the V8 power 300 lbs extra means nothing. For the Prius however a DE-TUNED 1.5 liter engine and extra weight really makes things worse when the battery is exhausted.

Yeah the SUV has more weight to fumble around but I've hear success stories of ford escape hybrid owners pumping their tires to max sidewall. For me my tires has always been the 52 psi 50 psi arena and mine only support up to 44 psi. Tires has a huge safety of margin when it comes to recommendations, watching a video how tires were constructed and how they are certified to be sold in the country, it would take 5 times the max recommended pressure before they would go boom.

And believe me when a tire is hard, and your driving style involves a lot of coasting, you really don't give the hard tire a chance to warm up. And that's confirmed by my digital gauge! (20 km of highway driving, still have 52 psi and 50 psi for my tires, didn't go up in pressure)

IMO it comes down to ride cushy-ness, or ride hardness if you want that extra coasting ability. But for SUVS I'd try the (2 psi increase every week per tire till you find your perfect spot.)

After all SUVS need all the efficiency tweaks they can get, for me the efficiency upgrade is never as drastic.