Toyota Prius C.
 

Hi - I currently drive a 2007 Honda Fit (love it!) and am looking at a 2015 Prius C. I love the C because it reminds me of the Fit and I'm looking for better mileage.

My concern is highway mileage - I know that this car was built for City driving, but it seems that some people are also getting great highway mileage with it. Some, however are not and that worries me.

If anyone can shed any light on this, I would love to buy this car but don't want to be disappointed as I drive 400 miles on the highway to work each week.

thanks much,
anne

Hello and welcome. Although I'm not 100% familiar with the Prius, I do know that hybrids of this type can get very variable MPG's. As you say, the main benefits will be seen in urban environments, but that's not to say they won't also do well on the highway. Plug ins can get extremely bad MPG, or extremely good, depends how and where you use them.

We have the fit here too, called the Jazz. They also do a hybrid version of that. I appreciate diesels are not as popular or readily available in the US, but they are perfectly suited to long highway stints with excellent economy. Worth considering at least.

The new Prius is just around the corner, so it may be worth holding fire until it's release, it's bound to be a better car than the current Prius.

I had a Prius C for a while and it was great in the city and the highway. It also got great mileage regardless of how I was driving it. The only complaint I have is that it felt somewhat gutless on the highway, but every Prius feels that way. I like the Prius C better than the larger Prius because it is smaller, cheaper and weighs significantly less. You should take a new one from a dealer for a test drive just to make sure you like the car. I liked that it was quite inside and very well built.

Keep in mind that variables that effect fuel economy do so on a percentage basis. This means a car with a high MPG will appear to have a bigger change. A 10% loss to a 20mpg car is 2mpg, but for a 50mpg one it will be 5mpg.

So slight changes in fuel economy that might have been shrugged off before are more noticable in the more fuel efficient one. Short trips in which the car doesn't fully warm up return worse fuel economy for all cars. It looks worse for a hybrid.

Same with speeding, and I expect those in a Prius c with poor highway fuel economy are going on the faster side.

Also, skip the 16in wheels if you are getting the top of the line trim. They will reduce fuel economy. Manufacturers aren't required to post ratings for different wheel sizes in the US.

Thanks for the info. I did drive the car and really liked it. Just wondering about highway mileage since I have a 400 mile weekly commute. Do you know what kind of mileage you were getting?


thanks,
anne

Thanks for the info. Agree on the wheels!
anne

Yes agree with trollbait, there is an epic 40 MPG difference between me driving like a nut case, and me driving like a granny going to church on a Sunday!

I used to get 49 mpg in the city, and 46 mpg on the highway using cruise control. I sometimes managed 50 mpg on the highway when I wanted to get good mileage, i.e. turning off the cruise control for hills and using the gas pedal and recovering as much energy as possible going downhill. Little effort goes a long way in a Prius.

Thank you very much for the info!

Not trying to bash, but can't these numbers be easily achieved without buying a tiny hybrid?
I know TDi vehicles can easily crack off 50+mpg hwy, many 80s and 90s cars could as well.

Keep in mind that VW TDIs were cheating emissions when they best hybrids on the highway. Not to say a legal one can't, but the only such currently available ones in the US are luxury brands. So they will cost more than the new Prius, let alone the cheaper Prius c. Then depending on region, the cost to fuel with diesel can be higher.

The '80s and '90s cars have had their EPA ratings down rated. Some could get hybrid numbers, but required more effort from the driver to do so. None that could do so would pass today's emissions or safety standards. The Prii are rated in the cleanest bin a car still burning fossil fuel can be in. The fuel misers of yesteryear were mostly rated at the minimum requirements of their laxer standards.

I used to have a 2005 Prius. The Prius c, Aqua or Yaris hybrid in other markets, has an updated version of its engine, a slightly smaller battery pack, and is likely lighter. The best I saw on my commute of about 2/3rds city roads at around 35 to 40 mph average was 58 to 60 mpg. The worse I ever saw was 30 to 33 mpg on the highway while doing 90mph. It was around 38mpg at 75mph.

The tipping point for most gasoline cars for going into dropping fuel economy from speed in 60mph or so. The Prius c may not hit its highway EPA if you are driving faster than that, but it will still do better than any other comparable gasoline car.

If highway and high speeds are what you mostly drive, a diesel might be worth considering. If you are looking at new or slightly used, you might be able to find a 2015 Cruze diesel; it was rated a little better on the highway than the Jetta. For VWs, you have to find pre2009 to avoid the cheater models. For a used Mercedes of reasonable price, you might have to look at older. I'm guessing, even used, BMW diesels will be too high at this point.

I really feel someone at VW stepped on someone at the EPA's toes, it took 7+yrs for them to be caught for god's sake.

They were caught by a third party non-profit doing research with on board exhaust sniffers that allowed real time on the road measurement. Until they published their findings the EPA and Europe weren't double checking dynamometer results with such equipment.

Without that study, VW would not have been caught.

Important to remember though, cheating or not, the Real world emission figures reveal that VW actually do pretty well against the official lab tested emission figures. The worst offender so far is Vauxhall, one of GMs European brands. Of course there's alot more to car ownership than tailpipe emissions.

IIRC Prius if mixed city highway driving but IF lots of highway then oil burner (Diesel)

Don't hit people with real world, they'll get offended. EPA testing is the only real world.

That doesn't explain how said vehicles can still achieve these numbers today, quite easily, nor how they can get 50mpg for 10yrs, then suddenly they can only get 32mpg according to the EPA.
Ever wonder if all older vehicles got down rated to make newer cars look better?
I've always blown away EPA estimates in my older vehicles, yet anything newer I've owned struggles to hit them.
EX: My 94 Voyager 3.0/3spd, rated 17/19/22, yet I rarely get under 25mpg, have gotten as high as 27mpg. My 95 3.3l/4spd, rated 16/18/22, yet it almost always averages over 23mpg.

My 06 Stratus SXT 2.7l, rated 19/21/25, which unless I drove all highway, averaged 22mpg.
The 2012 Corolla 1.8/5-spd we owned for a bit, rated 27/30/34, averaged 28mpg, best ever was 30.4mpg.

Another reason fuelly is so great, people now expect not to get official estimates, fuelly probably offers more real world figure expectations than any other place. Lab tests here are open to manipulation, and also modern cars have more fuel saving equipment, stop/start, cylinder deactivation etc etc which helps achieve higher figures during testing. Take my car for example, it's rated at 88 MPG highway. My best highway figures were 74 MPG, the industry average is 86% of that of lab figures.

The real world study that caught out the VW diesels showed they averaged 6 to 7 times the NOx limit over the multiple test routes. The BMW also in the study kept under that EPA limit except on a rolling hills portion where it went slightly above. When those exact same VWs were placed on a dynamometer and run through the EPA tests, they passed easily.

When the official lab tests do not reflect real world driving conditions, as in the NEDC ones, discrepancies between those results and ones on the road should not be surprising. That is not VW's crime. Their crime is that they blatantly cheated the system. Thus cheater VW diesels, and why the OP can't even buy a new one if they wanted too at this point.

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I have had no problem getting near the old EPA, but for a majority of Americans that simply wasn't the case. When hybrids became popular, the gap they saw between EPA and real world became bigger. Being ignorant of the fact that the window sticker numbers was to allow direct comparisons between models, and likely of what they were actually getting for fuel economy in their old cars, they whined and moaned about the EPA numbers being unrealistic.

So the EPA was pressured into making changes to the methods for determining the window sticker numbers to better reflect real world results. Cars from before the change were down rated so that their numbers can still be comparable with new cars being tested now.

My Prius, IIRC, had an old combined rating of 60mpg, and a new one of 46. My average was in the mid to high 50's. The average for the 2005 here is 44.5mpg. Kind in mind that Fuelly suffers from self selected bias. Those tracking their cars here care enough about their fuel economy to put in that effort, and are more likely to care enough to makes changes to improve their results. If we could get the 2005 Prius average for all of the cars, it will likely be lower than 44.5mpg.

Of the older cars that got hybrid like fuel economy, the civic VX is one of the most coveted by hypermilers. Even its updated numbers are close to the 2005 Prius'. It, and most of the other high efficiency cars of the time, were manual only. Back when it was new, only around 20% of car sales were for manuals. It is now 5% to 10% (the demise of the manual in the US is a separate topic). Making the average buyer looking for better fuel economy put in more work and effort for it.

The VX was a subcompact car. The Prius c is a compact with 14 cubic feet more passenger and cargo space. The 2005 and 2016 Prius are midsize cars with 22 cubic feet and 28 cubic feet more total space than the VX.

The VX got great fuel economy through lean burn, and while in that mode, it emitted a lot more NOx. It simply would not pass today's emission limits. In order for the original Insight to pass with lean burn in 2000, it required a LNT like many diesels now use.

The VX lacks today's safety features and other standard equipment taken for granted today. If it returned, it would gain a lot of weight. It could be said it did as the Insight2, a hybrid.

https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find...20934&id=37163

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Back to the OP. I just mentioned the Insight2. It has overall lower ratings than the Prius c, but Honda's hybrid system follows the traditional formula of getting better highway fuel economy than city.

Other car to consider is a 2015 Prius. It is more efficient on the highway than the c, and with 2016 being a new design, deals on the 2015 might be had.

Thank you for the nice info!

All Prii are a bit heavy and their engines take a big hit in MPG during the first 6 minutes to warm up the the catalytic converter to keep the emission near zero as soon as possible because the Prii are design to fulfill the Kyoto Protocol Treaty. A Prius is designed to be a low emissions vehicle first before they are high MPG vehicles. Drive any Prius only 1 to 5 minutes at a time and the fuel efficiency drops to about 12-20 mpg but their emissions during those 1 to 5 minutes is the lowest in the industry for a gas engine car due to the Prii design priority of heating up the catalytic converter to near optimal temperature in 5 minutes and most efficient temperature withing 30 minutes. The impact on the Prius' MPG gets even higher as the driving temperature goes to freezing at 32 degrees Fahrenheit... when that happen - preheating the Prius engine for 60 minutes with the optional 400W Toyota Engine Block Heater can boost MPG to an amazing level... Grill blocking and driving the Prius longer thant 60 minutes per trip can lessen the thermal losses on a Prius.

The Prius Hatchback is slightly more aerodynamic than the Prius C so at speeds higher than 65 mph - there is some fuel effiency advantage which show ups in the USA EPA ratings but at under 55 mph the Prius Hatchback aerodynamics over the Prius c and v is much smaller and the lighter curb weight of the Prius C means the Prius C more efficient at climbing hills than all other Prii models and the MPG advantage becomes very clear. All Prii designs benefit from the use of low rolling resistant tires - and switching to regular tires or snow tires causes a Prius MPG performance to drop. All Prius benefit from being driven by a driver skilled in hypermiling - the overall MPG boost being from 5% to 20% .. For example using a Scangauge II OBDII monitor with a 2010 Toyota Prius III I've been able to achieve 58 mpg over about six years and 78,000 miles.