Recently I had chance to go to the States for a business trip for 2 weeks, staying in hotel and on rental car (Hertz) for the whole 2 weeks. And as a faithful Luk4all editor, I took the opportunity to choose vehicles that us, Malaysian have heard a lot but never have a chance to drive, the Toyota Prius, a hybrid car. Of course I had the car only in the second week, the first week I could not stop myself from getting a 4.0L, V6 red hot mustang, but we will save the story for another day.

 

The Toyota Prius is one of earliest publicly sold hybrid electric vehicles and today it is one of the lowest fuel consumption car sold in the USA. On average the car as the US EPA (environmental protection agency) rated the fuel economy for Prius at 48MPG in city and 45MPG on highway, and in Malaysia term, with RM60 petrol you can drive almost up to….. 700KM!!! It cost about $22K and you can check it out here.

 

 

The vehicle that I had was basically a 1.5L silver Prius which has barely covered 2000 miles. The car was surprisingly quite spacious both front and rear seat for a compact by my standard, not as big as those big cars, SUV or MPV that I see so frequently on the streets in states, but big enough compared to my Vios. It can seat easily 5 adults. The boot or trunk was not type of conventional boot which goes low, but flat out with the rear seat, as it has to hold a ‘sealed NiMH battery’ which has power output of 28hp and voltage of 201.6V. The hybrid system net power is at 110hp. The gasoline engine have a power output of 76 hp @ 5000 rpm (57 kW @ 5000 rpm)  and electric motor 67 hp @ 1200-1540 rpm (50 kW @ 1200-1540 rpm).

 

 

The car has a very nice computer like control panel in the middle of the dash board, which showed how the engine operate with the battery, how much miles per gallon you are getting, how energy your car has generated, control your music, air condition of the vehicle and even let you make phone calls from your phone, by connecting the two through blue tooth. It is just totally AWESOME!!!

 

 

 

Basically I was driving the car for almost a week, drove for more than a week covering 139 miles or 223km and the gas tank meter showed that I still have more than half a tank full. At the end of the day before I return the car it the computer panel showed me that my average bad ass driving had me running the car at 42.1mpg or 17+KM/L. Driving was quite smooth for a semi electric car, although when you hit the pedal to accelerate you could feel the car lag a little bit, with both the electric and petrol motor kicks in. If drive slowly with no or very little acceleration and have some momentum carrying you forward, I found that I could drive on 100% electric motor and the control panel would showed a  99MPG!!!. The fastest I could hit with 100% electric motor was almost 27mph, anything beyond that the control panel showed the petrol powered engine kicking in.

 

 

Every time you decelerate or brake, the dynamo would kicks in and re-charge the NiMH battery, and you could actually hear the hissing sound of the dynamo running if you are running the vehicle at a quiet place.

 

In fact we have the video of the cool control panel displaying the different engine running at loaded at youtube.

 

 

 

We are no automotive engineer but from the experience of driving the vehicle, it is just a very efficient engine, running on petrol when you accelerate, efficiently switching between petrol engine and electric motor to save gas, and generating electric when you break or decelerate. Sounds easy right? J OF COURSE NOT!! I believe the tough part was to orchestrate all the components of switching between charging the battery, running on petrol or electric is like conducting a full orchestra. In fact orchestrating it is so tough (the first Prius went on sale in 1997), 10 years later Nissan started to license this technology from Toyota early this year into their Nissan Altima, a USA version of a bigger Sentra.

 

Tan Chong…. When can I see my Toyota Prius on Malaysian shore?