Every now and then it’s nice to see something cool on the oil / environmental front — and this is cool.

A week ago, five drivers took a car to a little stretch of road in Pennsylvania.  After a whole weekend of driving in four hour shifts, they had achieved fuel economy numbers that seem almost magical: 110 MPG.

So what was the secret?  It wasn’t some miracle fuel additive, some secret engine design, or some low friction track.  This was an ordinary car, running on ordinary roads, using ordinary gas.  The answer lies in two things: a unique ability of the Toyota Prius, and good driving technique.
This wasn’t the first time these drivers had achieved extraordinary mileage.  One of the drivers first posted about a 818 mile tank he had gotten over on PriusChat.com and challenged other drivers to beat him.  Within a week, reports came in of a 900 mile tank.  Then 967.  Then the first driver edged 1000.

With that experience behind them, the best of these drivers teamed up for a experiment in pushing the Prius to its mileage limits.  With a camera crew from HBO in pursuit, and lots of local media monitoring their progress, they set out on the Prius Marathon Run, hoping to get 1200 miles from one 12 gallon tank of gas.

For this run, they made only very slight changes to the car.  They pumped up the tires to 60psi to cut rolling resistance.  And they added some electronics.  Only the electronics weren’t really to improve the mileage, they were just to monitor the mileage.  The regular displays on the Prius only go up to 99.9 MPG, and these guys knew they were going to top that, at least for part of the trip, so they loaded in some aftermarket gear.

This thread in PriusChat details their progress, along with the comments of Prius fans (like yours truly) “watching” over the Internet as drivers came off their shifts and posted the results.  For those of us tracking the progress, this thing was every bit as exciting as any NASCAR race.  When the ‘add fuel’ warning began to flash around 1,000 miles, it seemed like the predicitions of 1100-1200 miles were going to be right on.  But the car kept on going for almost nine hours with the add fuel blinking all the way, finally reaching 1,397 miles before the well ran dry (and only then because the exhausted drivers finally decided to try to waste some gas).

The Pittsburg Post-Gazette caught some of the MPG-fanatic action:

Kroushl and four other middle-aged men are fuel-obsessive mileage maniacs, who drove themselves into the Internet’s record pages with a jaw-dropping joy ride over a 15-mile stretch of Route 65 in Sewickley while averaging a little more than 110 miles a gallon.”

Over on AutoBlog scoffers stood by to pan the event as “not real world numbers,” but one of the drivers, Wayne Gerdes, had an answer for them:

I do not know how much more real world you can get. Over the almost 48 hours of run time, we hit 300 stop lights and 175 slow downs to less then 20 mph when coming up to those stop lights before they changed green. The course was a std. every day slower speed 4-lane highway running along the west bank of the Ohio River near Pittsburgh, PA. We obeyed all traffic laws.

For someone who has a Prius but “only” gets 52MPG, these guys have set a high bar.  Excuse me while I practice my technique.

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