When most people think of a 'green car' they think of a hybrid; the most successful and popular being the Toyota Prius. This car is rated from the EPA with a fuel economy of 48MPG city and 45MPG highway and while that is incredibly efficient, we made it better!I'm only going to briefly go over power numbers with this vehicle, reason being the CVT makes getting a real dyno pull extremely hard to get so the graph above really only shows about 5,000 rpm through a speed range. Dyno testing at wide-open throttle means we are only graphing a slice of the cake as it is and then the CVT keeps the engine at one rpm making for an even smaller sample or 'bite' as you will so our results are really HP and Torque at WOT at 5,000 rpm. Also remember that our power results are the net hybrid output so the electric motor has some say in what was put down.
On to our results. With stock plugs we saw 116HP and 122 Ft-Lbs of torque. Acceleration from 40 to 80 mph took 10.32 seconds and the fuel economy trace consumed 619.3 cc of fuel.
Pulstar plugs installed with a .044 gap yeilded 119HP and 125 Ft-Lbs with acceleration taking 9.79 seconds and the fuel economy test taking 577.7 cc.
Our results are as follows, 3HP (2.59%) increase, 3 Ft-Lbs (2.46%) increase, a reduction of acceleration time by .53 seconds (5.14%) and a reduction in fuel usage of 41.64 cc or 6.72%.
Personally I was suprised at the fuel economy gains we had seeing as the Prius is so efficient from the get go.
3 comments:
I looked at the fuel economy test sheets on your web site. The sheet for the Pulstar plug test says 'Dist. Check =Failed'. I wonder if this might have caused the fuel consumption to be less than expected.
We found what was causing that. The trace file we actually made here and the distance check was using the value off the template. The HP window was the same way, we've corrected that now.
Did you guys use a fresh set of the OE plugs? or just the old ones that came with the car?
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