Prius C Review in Local Paper

The anti-Trump propaganda in most news publications and the liberal social values propaganda in Hollywood productions have really ticked me off.  But there is still some straight news (though usually with a lot of unanswered questions) that I find informative when going through the media.

So it surprised me when my wife cut out a review of the new Toyota Prius C from our local newspaper.  She's pro-Toyota and I tend to go along with her automotive preferences.  We have had only Toyota vehicles for years now, and that includes previous models of the Prius.  But this article was written so poorly I couldn't get past the mileage figures.

The author claimed to have driven the vehicle 300 miles and stated that he still had 2/3 of a tank of gas remaining, implying that the vehicle could get 900 miles on a tank of gas.  OK, that's a bit outlandish as I've never heard of a vehicle being designed to get more than about 450 miles on a tank of gas.  But maybe Toyota came up with a better design.  He also said that with a full tank, the Prius was indicating 760 miles of travel remaining.

Then he says that the vehicle's instruments showed he was getting 46.6 miles per gallon.  According to that, he would have used over 6 gallons to go his 300 miles, and his tank must be over 18 gallons if the data was accurate, including his 300 miles and 2/3 of a tank of fuel left.

Our three year old Prius (not the small C model) shows about 48-49 miles per gallon, and if we go over 300 miles we are getting low on fuel.  It has a very small gas tank.  Did they increase the size of the fuel tank by a factor of 2 or 3?  Was the miles per gallon shown on the Prius dash wrong?  Were the miles driven or the fuel remaining wrong on the instruments?  Did the author make a typo?

The author did not qualify any of his statements indicating uncertainty.  Nor did he suggest further testing to resolve any kind of inconsistency in his report.  Neither he nor his editor seemed to have any problem with the published article.

Personally, I could not trust this car reviewer in the future nor his paper to publish an accurate description of an event (even a non-political event).

I'm not sure what they are teaching journalists today.  Throwing out the political and social propaganda that you can hardly avoid, even the straight news is deficient in information.  Nearly every article leaves out critical information on who, what, where, when and why.  I don't know whether the journalists and their editors cannot think and write, or whether they just are unwilling to expend the resources to gather the information.

And even finding a written article is somewhat difficult.  All of the online media seem to be going to short video clips.  There's no way in a 2 to 5 minute clip that you are going to get thorough questions and answers on a topic.

I think that's enough frustration for today.