Real World: Prius worse MPG than BMW 520D

[Buktu]

My friend said he'd read an article about which cars were the most green over a period of 25 years. And the prius lost out to a range rover sport due to the range rover being much easier to recycle.

I have no link, and i don't know if it was in english or danish, nor do i know how serious this "study" was, but it's certainly interesting if accurate..

[thedguy]

^^^^ we've all read that article.

[nist7]

The Prius will get no support on car enthusiast forums. I drove one for 2 days (without a MPG indicator) with 4 occupants for the majority and got about 80mpg imp. Thats on the higher end of the Japanese models claimed MPG. I think there must be some differences between the domestic and export models, but still I don't know what they are doing to get such poor figures. Mind you, driving to Geneva isn't really "everyday" driving.

More than anything this highlights the lawmakers' poor decision-making abilities. Rather than applying tax benefits to cars based on their actual performance they give benefits to cars based on the name "hybrid" alone. Don't hate the Prius, hate the fools that made it out to be the holy savior when in fact its just a fairly fuel efficient car. (or at least it was when released over a decade ago)

Agreed. It ain't the worst and it ain't the best.

LOL, they just posted a link to this from the Yahoo! main page, and the comments are freaking retarded. Everyone is saying things like, OMG, it was mostly highway driving, blah blah, the Prius rocks, blah blah, BMW is more expensive.

They completely miss the point of the article, which is (at least this is what I thought it was) that there are diesel engines out there which can give hybrids a run for their money. The point is that, yes, the Prius has better fuel economy in the city than on the highway, and it's significantly cheaper than the BMW, but that there are more driver oriented cars like the BMW with reasonable performance that still get good mileage. I bet if you compared this car in a real world test to the Toyota Camry hybrid, the BMW would really kick ass. I thought the comparison was just to show how under certain conditions, the BMW could beat the "best" of the hybrids that everyone recognizes by name.

Indeed. This test is obviously biased towards the Bimmer with a fat man in the Prius and with non-equal highway/city driving miles.

A much more realistic and fair comparison would be to survey a large sample of Prius drivers versus 520D drivers and see what the avg MPG is....instead of doing ONE test with ONE car each under ONE very specific set of conditions. It almost makes you that this article is doing nothing but to try to "beat" the Prius and say "aha! Look at that....the Prius got owned by a luxury saloon!!! LOL1111!!!!"