xtcian

That navigation system is pretty cool. I think I'm either going to buy a Civic or an Acura RSX although Tessa made a good case for a Prius.

Peter and I had a similar underwater navigation experience in a Hertz rental car equipped with the Neverlost navigation system. We took the Ted Williams tunnel in Boston about a week after it was completed. Obviously the Neverlost supercomputers had not been updated about the completion of the tunnel, because menacing red arrows started flashing as the map showed us driving into the water and the robot voice told us to turn around and get back on an actual road.

Can't wait for Ian's springtime blog "Jart Meets Prius"

Obviously there needs to be a rule book for proper Jart play. Rule #1: No darts near the car.

"First off, the manufacturer's sticker mileage is only in comparison to other vehicles in the same category. I don't know exactly what that means...."

I am not as familiar with the scientific literature relating to this topic as I would like to be, but I think the theory behind it is more or less as follows: Because other manufacturers lie, Toyota has to lie about their mileage too, or else the Prius won't look so good _in comparison_ to other cars and Toyota won't make as much money as it would like to make.

What does "re-calibrated the control" entail?

"Recalibrating" was a fancy way of saying "reset" - it just starts the whole MPG calculations over, so that you get fresh results from a trip.

In other words, I blatantly misused the term.

I'm a day late on the Jarts excitment. That alone is worth a trip to the farm. I was in a semi-vintage toy store a few years ago with a buddy. He and his brothers did not find quite enough danger in the game of Jarts, so they would pick teams, sending one team to the front yard and one to the back, and throw the darts over the house. The object was to blindly land a dart the closest to a sibling on the other side without actually hitting them. Kinda like a game of homicidal "Battleship". Survival was the obvious strategy on the recieving side. After what must have been a frightening episode of Sixty Minutes, his Mom & Dad confiscated the evil Jarts. Undaunted, the family tradition continued without lawndarts. The brothers just got their Bow and Arrows out of the basement. Ain't America great! Their parents never saw an episode of 60 Minutes that illustrated the dangers of a Bow and Arrow. Long live dangerous child's play except in the case of my kids. They can have exactly as much fun as the Nerf corporation can invent for them.

Whenever one form of energy is converted to another, there is a certain part of that energy that is lost because of efficiency (actually, inefficiency) of the machine doing the conversion. So, in a hybrid electric vehicle, when the mechanical energy of the gasoline engine is converted to electrical energy by the hybrid alternator, THERE IS LOSS. Likewise, when the electrical energy is converted into chemical energy in the storage battery modules, THERE IS LOSS. Similarly, when that chemical energy is converted back to electrical energy, THERE IS LOSS. And finally, when that electrical energy is converted to mechanical energy by the electric motor, THERE IS LOSS. The only positive energy impact is when the car is decelerated by regenerative braking, producing electrical energy rather than the heat energy of a conventional braking system. When the bulk of the operation of the car involves little deceleration, this positive impact becomes insignificant. I contend that a hybrid electric vehicle, with all of the hybrid components removed (therefore reducing the car's mass and eliminating to multiple energy conversions) and powered by the same gasoline engine, will perform with a better fuel efficiency (greater miles per gallon). Anyone who has been exposed to high school level physics should be able to understand that I am correct on this. There is no such thing as a "free lunch" when it comes to machines and their relationships to energy.