I had a very interesting time with my Prius, Cassie, during our camping trip.

I keep up on Prius mailing lists via Yahoo fairly regularly, and before the trip, I had read a little bit about the “B” gear on the Prius. Basically, the “B” gear is equivalent to low gear on a standard automatic or an exhaust brake on a semi – it utilizes the engine as a braking mechanism to take pressure off of the brake pads. This is one of the rare things on a Prius that should almost never be used, since it can decrease overall MPG. However, anytime you see a low gear or hill sign, the “B” mode can likely be used quite effectively.

Forest Road 25 had a couple steep areas in which I was able to use “B” mode. Surprisingly, it doesn’t actually slow down the vehicle when used exclusively (though I suspect it does slow down the overall rate of acceleration). However, using it takes a bit of pressure off the brake pads so long as the battery doesn’t reach its full charge capacity. Once the battery reaches capacity through regenerative braking, braking results to the brake pads to slow down the car.

Shifting to “B” mode causes an interesting change in the engine noise to a fairly low-tuned hum and that hum lasts for the whole time in “B” mode. This is something I don’t recall from my test drive of an ’05 Prius, when the salesman (rather stupidly in terms of efficiency and demonstrating rather astoundingly his lack of Prius knowledge) switched to “B” mode in the middle of I-405, explaining it as a “battery-only” mode. At that point, I didn’t bother correcting him, since I didn’t know much about it either.

Cassie kept up very, very well during our trip. I never once had a concern about whether the car would break down or whether she would survive – we did the whole trip on a tank of gas which produced an astounding 75.45MPG tank (though the display calculated the tank to 53.1). This was after refilling the tank with roughly 4 gallons and filling a few days after the trip with nearly 7 gallons. Keep in mind that she was also loaded full in the back with cargo on the way to and from the campsite (though the day trips were done with very little cargo in the back seats).

The other nice part was the ranger in charge at Iron Creek, who started asking questions as I waited for Amanda to check us in. I explained that it was a Prius and that it was, in fact, on. He was quite surprised when I told him it was a hybrid and was fairly appreciative after that — appreciative enough that, when we went to make sure we didn’t need to do anything to check out, he thanked us for having “the quietest car in the campground”! That was the first time I had impressed anyone with this car, though I’m sure this will happen more.