One look at real world mileage figures at GreenHybrid between the Prius and Civic makes it obvious that the Civic approach is working just as well, all the while keeping it simple so less things go wrong. NASA rocket scientists bought a 2nd gen Prius to disassemble and figure out how it works, they failed. I don't know that the local lube tech at the Toyota dealers could do all that much better even with a factory helpline...This is a simple matter of efficiency. If you are running on pure electric power, what you are essentially doing is using the electricity to lug around a gas engine that you are current NOT using...which means you lose all your gains back to lugging this weight around. So really what you did is you are taking the energy from the gasoline, burning it and losing 75% of the stored energy to heat/friction in the process, then storing it in a battery, then pushing it back out through an electric battery to lose more energy so that you can push the engine around, the same engine you used to create the electricity. Honda's system requires much less electricity since the engine and motor work together, so much of the energy should be able to come from regenerative braking.Take a look at the figures on GreenHybrid. The Highlander 2WD averages 26MPG. I had a 06 Highlander V6 2WD with 4 people and a lot of luggage, driving around like a madman in NYC, Boston, etc and it avg'ed 22MPG. If I had pumped up the tires to 40PSI I could have easily gotten it to 26MPG...so you see their numbers aren't all that good. The 2nd gen Prius gets 48MPG avg, the 2nd gen Civic Hybrid gets 47...again a much simpler system yet same MPG. Camry Hybrid average 37MPG...several of our 4cyl members average 33MPG+ in mixed driving with no hypermiling.Dude I think if you are working at Target, you need to start looking down the road and forget about the damn car. It's a stupid idea to be dumping all your cash and getting loan on a car that's just going to keep going down in value...
