Then again, Toyota may have set the bar high for expectations. They claim ~50mpg and that is easily achieved by most drivers, with many drivers exceeding this number. The charts posted by Herm http://www.cleanmpg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=45723&page=28 don't look that bad. I still say that Ford disappointed its customers by over promising, especially when Toyota over delivers. Seems like an experienced hypermiler can get the 47 mpg from this car, but that takes a lot of work and a lot of slow driving. When you do that with a Prius, you get 20-30% more mpg than the quoted amount, not just barely meet the spec promised.

This guy is not a hyper-miler. Hyper-milers get upper 60s -lower 70s mpg. I get 55 mpg in the Prius 2010 without even trying (OK - 1/2 highway at 65mph and 1/2 local streets). My last tank was 658 miles using 10 gallons to fill back up. It sounds like Ford is guilty of deceiving customers. There is no excuse for that. Punishment is bad PR and loss of sales from people who won't buy from a dishonest manufacturer. Whatever wrist slap the EPA gives them, customer backlash will be worse.

@AD - have you considered renting a car for those 2 long trips a year?

17 out of 42 gallons of crude in a barrel is for gasoline. 7 billion * 17 = 119 billion gallons of gasoline. So 16 billion out of 119 billion is 13%, so the above numbers seem reasonable. http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=33&t=6 There are 42 gallons (1 U.S. gallon = 3.78 liters) in a barrel (i.e., 1 barrel of oil = 159 liters). When converting to oil to Metric Tonnes (MT), there is around 7.3 BBL per MT, and 304 Gallons per MT. Originally there were 40 gallons to a barrel. However, that was changed in the mid-19th century to give a little extra so consumers wouldn't feel "cheated." According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 1 "BBL" of crude oil makes about 17 gallons of gasoline, 12 gallons of gasoil, 7 gallons of jet fuel or kerosene, while lubricants, light naphtha and asphalt makes up the rest. This ratio depends on the crude type and varies a lot.

As long as the employers offer free charging, or at least charging rates that one would get at home. Signing up with blink is painful. You get gouged unless you have an empty Tesla or Leaf battery. Topping off kills you in minimum fee prices.

When people make so many grammar mistakes in their postings, I figure their logic is equally flawed.

Their total level of engineering seems to be a bit behind that of Toyota, but hopefully, like Toyota, they will improve with each iteration.

This is good for China. All of those GM cars will create a huge demand for auto mechanics to fix the POS GM cars and help keep the massive China labor force employed.

@seawolf. Thanks. Crazy spec. My other car is a PiP and we usually get ~13 miles on a charge in phoenix. Warm weather helps.

Prius PiP gets 6 miles all EV? Where do they get this number? It gets 11-12 miles all EV.

Except that the Volt and the PiP are in production now. We'll see what sort of bugs Ford has left in the car to clean up on the 2nd rev. Hopefully, they will have a solid car at the intro, but I'll believe it when I see it. Driving my Prius very "gently" to see just how many mpg I can achieve on a single tank of gas, I'm currently at 69 mpg on 585 miles (indicator reads 72 mpg) with 2 bars out of 10 remaining. I should hit 700 miles on this tank. I wonder if Ford's first incarnation of a focus hybrid could achieve that with careful driving.

I've test drove the Volt, Leaf, and Prius. the Volt does drive much better than the Prius, but the Prius's roomy interior makes it much more versatile than the Volt. So, I don't think they are targeting the same buyer characteristics.

Their report does say they get their money's worth out of the system, but they do say there are issues integrating solar with their local grid - presently an unsolved problem. Here is another good paper/report with a host of great references: http://www.clubs.psu.edu/up/math/presentations/Curtright-Apt-08.pdf

3.5 MW solar array next to a 420 MW coal plant. 3.3 Impact on Utility Operations The PV Generating Plant is located next to the coal-fired Springerville Generating Station and is intertied to the same transmission line that feeds power back to Tucson. TEP is observing that PV generating intermittencies associated with short timescale events, such as cloud passage and storms, are in fact swinging the controls of a 420 MW coal fired unit at the generating station. These impacts bring into question the capacity value of solar in the utility plant operations and emphasize the need to stabilize PV power output, perhaps through storage or inverter modifications, in the utility environment.

@ Roger - yes, I forgot to compare it to the "effective" load factor of the 1 TW generation capacity, so my number should have been 2 x 60 GW = 120GW. If solar panels installed cost $2 instead of $4, then that brings it to 240 GW. But Solar is way too intermittent to be treated as steady. You have to add storage to be able to treat it as base, and as of today, batteries cost a lot more than the panels. Solar can relieve the use of fuel at this time, but not replace base stations. http://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/review_meeting/pdfs/p_20_moore_snl.pdf

Roger, Solar may tend to track load, but no, it can not replace load. Look at the Springerville AZ report of a modest solar field near a coal plant. They do not play well together. Light clouds caused oscillations in the power delivery of the panels causing the automatic control unit at the coal plant to go into oscillations which needed to be manually reset. You have to add in the cost of storage if you are going to seriously make solar a "base" source of electricity.

The US generating capacity is 1 trillion watts. If solar is $2-$4 per peak watt (installed including land purchase, but not transmission lines) and the load factor is 26% (from the sun not being at full force all day), then you could install effectively 1/16 * 1 trillion watts for 1 trillion dollars = 60 GW. Wow - 60GW is a lot, but not that much. It would make solar an addition 6% of the energy mix. You could probably do better wind wind, but it has load factor issues too.

@HarveyD - your view is short sighted.

? Chinese are used to crappy quality? Or, they haven't had enough experience to find out GM cars break in 50 different ways, while other brands don't? Or the other cars the Chinese are able to purchase are still crappier than GM?

Do any of you arm chair quarterbacks actually own a hybrid?

A 4.4 KWH prius battery will not help you for a 2 week outage unless you mean by preventing a 2wk outage. But the utility company should be able to prevent the 2 wk outage, and that is an underlined, "should".

Don't they know how sensitive EV owners are about their batteries? I wouldn't send my EV battery through more charge/discharge cycles just to trim peak levels unless I was paid to do so at a level which made me comfortable. Long term this is good, but short term, EVs are just getting started, give them a break - don't make them do double duty so early.

@Bob Wallace. Interesting study. I just sent a note to the author of the study to see if he had enough data to say if within a household, the miles driven in that household shift to the Prius. It's not an apples to apples study to say that just because Prius miles are similar to miles on other cars, that no mile shifting goes on. On the otherhand, I think it does say that any mile shifting going on, is not significant on a large scale to affect total gasoline consumption.

One factor that might not be considered is that longer trips get shifted onto the Prius in homes that own Prius. So these cars should have a higher weighting factor when considering how many gallons of gas are being saved - i.e., the average Prius car puts on more miles per year than the average car. BTW - "Anyone commenting here own a Prius?"

@mahonj - Collapse and "Guns, Germs, and Steel" are two of my favorite books. Someone did point out that Japan is very respectful of its own trees, but has no problem cutting down trees of other countries. Also, in Collapse, there are Indian civilizations that didn't mind their ecology very well and didn't make it. Hopefully, we will learn how to be more efficient and everyone on the planet can benefit from these gains. I think Toyota has the winning formula with the Prius technology. I don't think pure BEVs will overtake HEVs for quite sometime.