Using your steering wheel's left-side control pad, navigate to settings then meter settings. Scroll to Drive Info 1/2 and adjust to your liking. In this case, I set the car up to display fuel economy AFTER START. This means your CURRENT fuel economy for a given DRIVE SESSION (after start) will show. This will give you an idea of how your driving is for any given session. The Prius used to do this by default and I was annoyed that the CT200h took it out (same drivetrain) so I'm delighted to find this in the 7ES. I assume ES350s have this too.. but if I were an ES350 driver I wouldn't want to look.

Initial observations doing aggressive start/stops stop light to stop light, it shows around 32-35. But the more I regen and more I drive uninterrupted (green lights) fuel economy shoots back up to around 39-40 ish. If I have even more uninterrupted driving, between 40-50mpg.

I'm going to play around with the meter more. never really touched it before since the settings are locked out when you drive and i don't have many times i'm sitting in the car not driving. so i just discovered this.

"after start" while running a quick errand a few miles away. not much meaning so don't read too much into the displayed mileage. still it could be 20 mpg.

 

Hey, it'd take more than that to make me not want to look. My old car got 15 city / 26 highway with premium.

 

Who cares. Mine resets automatically at each fill. Whether it's 24 or 34 really doesn't change my life one bit.

 

I wish the eco meter showed when the ICE actually starts.. It makes it very difficult to guess when I am in EV mode or how close I am to actually activating the engine. It would help me go from light to light drastically.

 

The ES350 has it as well as a Drive Info option for a current fuel consumption bar type gauge showing the "instantaneous" mpg. I don't know how accurate it is nor how short the time window used in interval averaging to reduce jittering in the "instantaneous" mpg graphing but it seems fairly responsive to driving conditions. Shows 0 when stopped, pegs out at the 40 maximum display value when no accelerator input coasting, and varies as one would expect in correlation with accelerator input.

As to not wanting to look, the few times I've looked it wasn't that bad. On a recent 4000 mile round trip got an overall, whole trip average of 33.7 MPG according to the MID reading. The vast majority was interstate or divided highway driving with two parts through he Rocky Mountains, other parts hilly terrain, and some flat as a pancake. Except for the small parts of city driving and a few unpaved rural back roads, all DRCC cruising mostly in the 80+ range with a long stretch or two in 90+ range. There was one flat as a pancake, very low minimal traffic stretch where I moseyed along at 70 to avoid contributing to the local governments' revenue stream. On that stretch I got so bored I put up the fuel consumption histogram on the side screen so I could have something to watch for entertainment. Long stretches of the 10 minute long histogram of a solid filled in to the maximum display value of 40 MPG. The only time it dipped below that to around 38 MPG was climbing an overpass over railroad tracks.

While not as miserly with the fuel as a 4 banger hybrid, still not that bad for a V6 cruising along at "can't drive 55" velocities.

 

It's a hybrid driver thing... it's why Toyota programmed the algorithm to display automatically on the Prius. If your current MPG for any drive session is shown, it shows you and trains you how your very recent driving habits are affecting your mileage. Basically a reminder to take it easy. it's amazing how much ONE stop light can absolutely tank your MPG. you don't realize this without such a display. you'll see your session MPG drop in real time as you take off from that light. conversely you can see how much a gentle cruise can HELP your mpg.

Just got 61 mpg on my morning commute just now because this display was right in front of me. almost like a challenge or a video game.

again.. a hybrid driver thing. =p

 

I come from a long line of bad MPG cars, track cars, etc. lol so yeah i'm familiar with all kinds of MPG. My last non hybrid was a IS200t and some sessions I would get MPG in the 14s/15s. And I hated looking at it. Sure if I tried i could get 32-33 mpg on a highway trip.

 

Must be nice not caring what MPG your car gets

 

If you really care, get a Prius or a Chevy Bolt.

 

Clearly a hybrid driver thing

 

So last night here in MA the temps dropped to single digits and my EV mode would not kick in at all. I tried every which way possible for it to kick in and the only way I could get it to kick in was turning off the climate control. After about 25 minutes of driving i was able to get it to kick in if i set my climate control to 70 degrees or less. I went from getting 55mpg in the summer to getting high 30's on this tank of gas. Needless to say i was disappointed for sure.

 

My experience exactly. We must drive the same. Haha

 

Normal cold weather behavior for hybrids. Something has to heat the water for that heater core. Perhaps they need to make the heater electric and then the gas engine might not need to run as much in cold weather. Of course, it would deplete the battery much faster…

 

So on my morning commutes, I've been showing 47, 48, 47 mpg on my trips so far. pretty consistent. 30/70% highway around town trips around 38-40 mpg. pretty fun to keep track of that dynamic to get a sense of which commutes/trips/situations zap most fuel.

 

and today I averaged 55.2 mpg for my commute. movin' on up!