Phthursday Musings: Beyond the Threshold

We got our Prius in December 2016. It’s a 2013 with one previous owner. It’s been great, we’ve had very little to complain about.

This is a picture of it from the day we brought it home:

Way back in 2004 when I got a new Nissan Sentra, I had the idea that I should track its mileage. I’ve dutifully tracked the mileage on the Sentra, and then the 2004 Hyundai Sonata we got in 2011, and then the Prius, ever since. (We traded in the Sentra when we got the Prius.) So, yes… I’ve got 21+ years of almost complete mileage logs. Not only have I been that extreme, my poor wife has actually played along the whole time.

Friends, I am stoked to announce that it has, at long last, finally happened:

The Prius achieved 50 miles per gallon on a tank.

Thanks to mostly extended highway driving in the high 60s, favorable temperatures, and literally years of experience trying to glide with the gas pedal, we today had a breakthrough: 479.8 miles on 9.491 gallons for 50.55 mpg.

In the grand scheme of things this no doubt seems a minor achievement. I assure you that it is not. The closest we had ever come before this was in October 2018 when we got to 49.79 mpg. I have been trying to make this happen for almost seven years.

The final miles of the tank were logged while listening to the latest episode of the Volts podcast where David Roberts was discussing how legitimately cheap solar and battery storage have gotten. Yes, I know there are a lot of bad things going down as regards climate right now. But the electric transformation has only just begun. Battery prices will continue to go down, and while our federal government is currently a kleptocracy, it’s not going to last, and when it collapses, there will be real opportunity to roll out programs built not upon the promise of electrification, but instead the reality of it, the reality that it’s much cheaper than new coal or new nuclear and is actually going to get cheaper than natural gas at some point.

In celebration of today’s feat, I am now sharing with you statistics you almost certainly could not care less about:

• Overall, the Prius has averaged 41.03 mpg since we bought it, based on logging 79,570 miles and using 1,949.2 gallons of gas. (The latter number is very slightly estimated based on lacking data for a couple of fillups.)

• The most expensive fillup was $50.80, on June 13, 2022, even though it was only for 8.611 gallons.

• The longest duration between fillups was 65 days, as the result of an extended delay in auto body repairs because a presumably horny buck tried to ram the car just outside of Lacon.

• By far the most frequent brand has been Shell. 88 of the 227 known locations have been Shell stations. The closest station to our house which isn’t ExxonMobil is Shell, and this was also true at our old house. I know most of these companies are awful and Shell is no exception, but to me, ExxonMobil is the absolute worst and I avoid them like the plague. Your, ahem, mileage may vary.

I drive most of the highway miles, but since I work from home, I don’t drive it to work. Now here is the thing, and if you have or have had a Prius or a comparable car you know this, but maybe you don’t know this: If you want a hybrid to be highly performant you may have to learn how to do just so with your foot to get it to do well, and in my household, approximately 50% of all drivers are absurdly fussy about trying to do this, while approximately 50% of all drivers are not.

Look: I was going to skip another Phthursday, because I’m freaking exhausted. But I couldn’t not write about all this. I couldn’t deny you all.

Last week we were briefly in Grand Rapids, which means here is this week’s Phthursday Flag:

This is the logo flag of Grand Rapids. It is not the “official" flag, but it is a flag based on the city’s logo, so I think it is still somehow official. I admit to be confused about how a city can have two flags, but that is not the point. The point is that this flag is spectacular.

The yellow is the sun, the blue squiggle through the sun is the Grand River, and the red is a wild representation of La Grande Vitesse, aka “the Calder”, a big hunk of red-orange metal sculpted by Alexander Calder and which has become a symbol of the city. (Rockfordians will note how eerily similar this all sounds to Symbol.)

I also simply must share the original flag of Grand Rapids:

I mean… wow. Wow.

And I am out of time if I’m going to publish by midnight in the time zone I am in. Good night, ladies and germs!