Orcrone — Yes, I'd also guess that the newer V6 would be better, but I don't know by how much. Maybe schmidtj (who owns an 2007 XLE V6 as well as a TCH, I believe) could provide some real-world numbers?

Stan

 

Well lets see here. I was paying $780.00 per month for gas driving my Chrysler Aspen (SUV that was getting 15 MPG) and Chrysler 300 (that was getting about 19 MPG). Now I am only paying $300.00 per month for my TCH and HCH. So, if you take both of them into play (no including the tax break) they will pay for themself in about 15 months. My wife and I drive over 160 miles total each day in both cars. I drive 50 miles to work and 50 miles back. The wife drives 30 miles to the sitter and then to work and 25 miles home and 5 miles of misc. driving. So this is really paying off for us. I can go 5-6 days on a tank of gas where as my wife in TCH can go a full 10 days before she needs to refill.

$480 X 15 = $7200 saving just in gas in my first year. That is if gas remains at $2.95 per gal. here in AZ.

Now my numbers are just based on gas. I paid $2K more for my TCH vs the V6 and only $1500.00 more for hm HCH vs. the HC-EX.

 

Orcrone — Good point. I looked up the Canadian fuel-economy specs from the brochure for my old 1993 Camry V6 automatic, and compared them to the brochure values for the current 2007 Camry V6 automatic and Hybrid. [Are they comparable measurements? I don't know.] Here they are (city/hwy), converted to US and Imperial too:

(a) 1993 Camry V6 automatic:13.0/8.9 L/100 km; 18/26 mpgUS; 22/32 mpgImp

(b) 2007 Camry V6 automatic:10.7/7.0 L/100 km; 22/34 mpgUS; 26/40 mpgImp

(c) 2007 Camry Hybrid:5.7/5.7 L/100 km; 41/41 mpgUS; 50/50 mpgImp

So, the 2007 V6 claims to be ~21% better than the 1993 V6, and the TCH claims to be ~19% better than the 2007 V6 on the highway spec. Likewise, the change from the 1993 V6 to the TCH is ~36% highway, so perhaps my measured 42% improvement is in the right ballpark.

Stan

 

1-Year Update:
My TCH has now had its first birthday (July 21), and so I thought I'd update my post #9 with a full year's worth of data. I compared the fuel usage of my previous 1993 Camry V6 LE (3.0 liter, 185 hp) for the 12-month period July 2005 to July 2006, to my 2007 TCH (187 total hp, and about as peppy as the V6 was) for the comparable 12-month period July 2006 to July 2007. My driving is largely in-town, short-trip (maybe 2/3rds of the total mileage) and 1/3 on the highway. This is what I found:

Camry V6 — 14 205 km / 1 674 L => 11.8 L/100 km = 20.0 mpgUS = 23.9 mpgIMP

Camry Hybrid — 15 568 km / 1 075 L => 6.90 L/100 km = 34.1 mpgUS = 40.9 mpgIMP

That's a 41% overall reduction in gasoline usage (i.e., a 41% improvement in fuel efficiency) from switching to the hybrid. I'm impressed! Yes, the hybrid's FE drops dramatically in winter stop-start driving here in Ontario, but so does the FE of regular vehicles.

Stan

P.S. I had a block heater fitted at the end of last year, after I saw how long it took for the car to reach operating temperature when the weather was cold. In two-and-a-half hours the block heater raises the block temperature by ~30 degrees Celsius above the ambient temperature. This makes warm-up very much faster, reduces ICE wear, provides cabin heat sooner, and at 10 cents/kWh costs me only ~10 cents per day — definitely less than the cost of the fuel saved. I'm continuing to use the block heater this summer too!

 

You know, I saw this on Prius forum but it may work for TCH as well, some people use foam "pretzel??", the thingy you would use in a pool to help you float, to block some of the air flow into radiator. They put it in the front end opening and that should pretty much lower cold air flow under the hood and keep temperatures higher. Now I wouldn't do this unless the temperatures were at least close to freezing and I would keep close eye on engine temperature, but it may improve car operation in brutally cold weather, especially when the car is parked away from your home. I also remember seeing somewhere in the museum or something, that military cars had this manually adjustable sort of "blind" that would limit air flow as well.

 

For interest, I also broke down my fuel usage data, presented in post #14 above, into separate summer (July - August) and winter (January - February) 2-month periods, to see how the greatly-reduced average temperature in winter affected my FE numbers. What I found is that, for both cars, the FE dropped by exactly the same amount, 28%, between summer and winter! Moreover, the comparison of just the summer (winter) numbers between the two cars showed that my TCH used 44% (43%) less fuel than my 1993 Camry during these extreme 2-month periods. The consistency of these data surprised me — the benefit of the hybrid isn't just for summer driving, but appears to hold about equally for both summer and winter!

Pete4 — The thermostat in the coolant path to the radiator only opens at ~82 degrees C, so that for short in-town winter trips it's always fully closed. (This is based on my ScanGauge's live readout of block temperature.) So, blocking the air flow through the radiator will have almost no effect during such trips.

Stan