Neons have very bad reliability records. My personal opinion is a hyper miler on the cheap is any of the 80's Toyotas, super reliable and awesome mileage.

A really good hyper miler right now is still the number one, the first gen Honda Insights. The factory 10 yr replacement warranty batteries on many of them are going bad now, when this happens all the dash lights go on and eventually the cars stop running. When owners take them to the dealer, they get outrageous quotes to replace the battery packs, and end up selling the gen 1's super cheap. What most don't know is it is very easy to bypass the batteries completely and still get very high mpg out of them, they just accelerate slower. Or you can get a better than factory aftermarket hybrid battery pack for $2k new. My Honda has dead battery packs and still gets ~65 mpg, and I am not a hyper miler, I do know if I just drive 45mph my car maintains a consistent 120mpg on flat land. It is just a 1 liter gas engine car much like the Geo Metro, but with better aerodynamics and better freeway gearing.

BTW most Hybrids must have working hybrid batteries to operate, like the Prius.


https://badges.fuelly.com/images/smallsig-us/319192.png

Hmm I hadn't thought they were particularly unreliable...

Insight battery packs can sometimes be at least partly repaired through a good grid charge.

Here are some more as they pop into my head. The Hyundai Sonata/Kia Opta twins are good, at least for longer-distance cars. Camry and Avalon hybrids are kind of forgotten gems as well. I have also heard fairly good things about Duratec 20-equipped Foci and Mazda3s. Escort ZX2s have the dated Zetec, but are fairly light and aerodynamic. And the myriad Escprts and Foci with Ford SPI are decent too.

I'd be curious how some of the older 90s Sentras do in this regard.

I have a 1999 S10 4 with a man trans. In the right location it can get 50 mpg if you count all the coasting when in the hills otherwise it gets 27 mpg.. Shut down the motor in the down hills and use the force of the pickup to start it at about 15 mph. This only works when the terrain is very hilly and only on back roads with no traffic. Would like to find out if anybody has been doing this with a Toyota Prius or a Chev Volt ?

Priuses and Volts do this pretty much automatically. One thing to consider though, leaving the vehicle in gear going downhill usually does not use any gas if you're not touching the accelerator as the computer turns off the fuel injectors.

By no means is this universal, it was well into the 2000s before this became that common.

I hang out with hypermilers. Volts aren't popular in the community due to cost and reliability, but the techniques mentioned are the bread and butter for them of driving a Prius.

But remember a car in neutral will travel much much further than when in gear, and pick up more speed too. Personally I always go in neutral down hills, you will see the trip MPG on your dash start going up instantly, and on some hills I can gain 3-6 MPG accordingly :)

Volts just use grid electric and no gas 35+ miles.

What reliability issues have they had?

Man, this thread has really drifted. OP started it to discuss cars that you would not expect to get good fuel economy but do, not the Volt, Prius, Mirage, Escort, Accent, Golf, Echo, Neon, Insight, Camry/Avalon hybrid, Mazda3, Focus, etc. These are all cars that are expected to get good fuel economy and hypermile well. I suppose in markets that are different than I'm used to, perhaps they are expected to get relatively bad fuel economy and that's why we're talking about them, but I'm not sure about that.

For reference, here was the OP:

I was trying to approach the sleeper in a different manner. I was thinking that if a person looks at the market at the older Chev Volts and the Toyota Prius (after they get close to 100k miles) they have no warranty and have a low price because the batteries are too expensive to replace. Can they be made to literally remove the extra weight of the hybrid system and use the basic car and use it as a hypermiller . the bad thing is the automatic transmission. Can this be a practical cheep try at it?