The Prius Challenge Leader board - can you do better?
The Prius Challenge has been underway now for a couple of weeks and we have had quite a few people through. It has been amazing to gauge their reactions to the whole experience.
Some of the celebrities have been very competitive, and fitting 2 massive Nelson Giants in the back seats was certainly entertaining.
The Prius Challenge is a competition though, so lets take a look at the Leader Board at the moment. Check out those figures - the top 3 drives are achieving fuel consumption around 3 litres per 100 km, and the Top10 are all under 4 litres / 100km!
For those of you that know your car stats this is quite remarkable, and the whole point to the challenge. For instance, NZ's most beloved car, the Toyota Corolla has a 4.5 star fuel economy of 7.3 litres/100km. But there is so much more to this story than just fuel economy.
On the whole most of those that have taken the Prius Challenge leave certainly more aware of the whole process of driving. It seems that for most people driving has just become something that you don't even think about, something that happens in automatic mode, where you almost disengage and go into robot mode.
The Prius Challenge has broken that habit for a lot of those that have taken it, and generally most people are shocked by how uninvolved in the whole driving process they actually are.
Not only does the Prius C show you exactly how you can drive more fuel efficiently, but it also seems to wake some people up and put them back in touch with the joy of driving.
Interestingly the end result of this new attention to detail is that most of those we talk to say how relaxed they feel. The car actually relaxes them even though they are concentrating more on what they are doing. The quiet nature of the drive, and the concentration on the action of just driving seems to remove some of the background noise from our daily lives and is actually refreshing.
However at the end of the day it is all about showing as many people as possible just how easy it is to make slight adjustments to their driving style and the impact that this has on fuel economy, so if you are reading this why don't you share it with your social networks and come down and get your name on the leader board. It will only take half of your lunch break one day, and what better way to spend a lunch break than driving around our fair city and possibly winning this amazing car all fuelled up for an entire week!.