Mani

http://www.realflight.com/g5_5features.html

Could've sworn he had Beverly Hills as his location when all this started. I'll go stand in the corner.

Auckland is not known as the States. There are no 2010 GS300 in the United States of America. This individual is in the USA and presumably driving a 2010 GS300 which does not exist here.

That make sense. What is hurting the performance is the detonation by way of the knock sensors retarding the timing. Turbo cars generally need high octane due to the cylinder pressure and heat it develops. Same with high compression engines. There is absolutely no adverse consequences for mixing different octanes. I used to run C16 [leaded 116 octane] and routinely used to mix it with other non leaded fuels when I didn't have to run ball out boost. I'm probably repeating what most of you have already said in here.

Higher the octane, higher the flash point. Run the lowest octane you can get away with. Higher octane does not improve performance. It is a myth.

No man, there is no GS300 in 2010 in the state and definitely not a limited edition.

There is no such thing as a 2010 GS300 in the states. It's either GS350 or 460. Is this a US car?

Looks like the rider is the one on "kota uda", not the rides.

That is a lot of riding on a Sport Bike Skyline and nice bike as well. Ya Ripper, the joys of wide open roads

Had me Googling Thundercats. That was a great show. LOL

It's Prii... Haven't you been following the news?

Good logic but the issue is not that logical. i.e. Some trans will have the drain plug but it is a lifetime fluid deal. However, there are exceptions to this rule based on driving conditions so the fluid may have to be changed. Secondly, having a sealed trans do not necessarily mean it is a life time fluid deal either. The best source is the owners manual where it is always explained in detail when and with what to change the fluids. Follow that and you should be safe. Something to be cautious about is WS [world standard] trans fluid must be replaced with in kind fluid. I've known some individuals here who neglected this little information and used the non WS fluid, to save few bucks, which can damage the trans.

And you know this how

Check the pulley alignment. If your pulleys are out of alignment it'll cause premature belt wear.

You built 4 closets with shitters in 3 of them???

Happy B day Don.

I don't think that is a valid argument. SL is not the only country that use those items. There aught to be something that encourage people to properly dispose them similar to some of the other countries. It is no more the responsibility of a cigarette manufacture to have the streets free of butts than it is a car or cell phone company to make sure how and where their products are disposed of. Further, most hybrid manufactures have a recycling process for their batteries.

BLu3HaZe A fact to the matter is that better than 90% or Prius drivers [or any hybrid for that matter] don’t give a rat’s ass about the environment. The simple fact is that it hits you less hard at the gas/petrol or whatever station. Put 10 gallons in and hammer it for 500 or so miles and repeat. The car will out accelerate most, if not all, of the compacts in its segment or price point. For what it's intended for, it is a great vehicle. As far as esthetics goes, it is entirely subjective. I personally think it looks like crap but if you're looking for a boost to your ego, this is not the car for you. Nor will you get any half way decent looking chick to throw her panties at you. The bottom line is the cost of ownership of this vehicle is much less than a comparable compact car. One look no cooler in a Corolla, Axio, Sentra or a Prius except the guy driving the Prius may have few bucks more in his pocket than the other. This is new technology for SL and people are apprehensive about it. I get it. It was the same in the US when the first Hybrids hit the market. Think back to when fuel injection was first introduced and all the potential problems people thought it carried. Give it enough time to marinate and once the real facts are out, people will not be as hesitant to look at a Hybrid vehicle as they are now.

Some of you boys are so misguided on this whole Prius thing it's starting to be very entertaining. Suffice it to say that facts are a wonderful thing. This article will get you started. Some wonderful urban legends have sprung up about the Prius and its battery, the most colorful being this claim about the hybrid being less ecofriendly than a Hummer. Some of the more thrilling chapters originated in one study done by a marketing company that was not peer-reviewed but, unfortunately, was widely quoted in the media. Writer George Will, who is syndicated in 450 papers, penned an April column on the topic, headlined "Use a Hummer to Crush a Prius." The story was also pumped into the Internet-disinformation pipeline by gleeful bullies for whom size is apparently quite important, and before long the Prius had morphed into a sort of traveling toxic-waste dump trailing clouds of diabolical fossil-fuel exhaust. You can disprove most of the false claims by doing a bit of math. Regarding the hybrid battery, let's say a Hummer is driven 200,000 miles in its lifetime. Its EPA rating is 14 miles per gallon in the city and 18 miles per gallon on the highway. Let's be real generous and assume it is driven only on the highway at a reasonable speed, yielding the maximum mileage. Divide 200,000 by 18, and you're talking 11,111 gallons of gas. Next let's calculate the Btus in that amount of gasoline and convert them to kilowatt-hours. Gasoline has between 115,000 and 125,000 Btus per gallon, so the Hummer would burn through about 1.3 billion Btus over those 200,000 miles. Since there are 3,412 Btus in a kilowatt-hour (kWh) of energy, this would convert to almost 400,000 kilowatt-hours, which, at the rock-bottom price of five cents per kilowatt-hour, would be about $20,000, or almost as much as the price of a Prius. If the energy to make the hybrid battery came from fuel oil, which has around 140,000 Btus per gallon, it would take an estimated 9,524 gallons of oil to match the Hummer's 1.3 billion Btus. At $2 a gallon, that's also about $20,000. Now if Toyota is truly spending that much money on the battery alone, U.S. automakers can stop worrying about the Japanese competition pronto. Either that, or Toyota is cooking up the most brilliant marketing strategy in the history of modern capitalism: investing unprecedented prodigious funds in a loss leader! In any case, the study indicting the Prius has been discredited by a number of reliable sources since its appearance early this year. As David Friedman, the research director of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Clean Vehicles program, put it: "This study has been completely contradicted by studies from MIT, Argonne National Laboratory, and Carnegie Mellon's Lifecycle Assessment Group. The reality is hybrids can significantly cut global-warming pollution, reduce energy use, and save drivers thousands at the pump." Among the many critics of Hummer hugging, Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute noted that one of the many flaws of the CNW Marketing study is that it is based on fudged figures. As he points out, it assumes a Hummer would travel 379,000 miles in its lifetime and last 35 years, whereas a Prius would only go 109,000 miles and last 12 years. So of course, using these figures, the amount of energy needed to make the Prius is going to come out high on a per-mile basis. (Who knows? In real-world time the Hummer might well have a shorter life because when the owners get bored with their mega-toys and want to dump them, no one may want to buy these gas hogs. Note also that I could've fudged and used that 379,000-mile figure, which would've jacked up the Hummer's lifetime energy use for fuel alone to a value of around $37,000.) Getting back to the Prius's nickel metal hydride battery, laments about its other environmental iniquities were largely based on reports of environmental devastation from nickel mining in Sudbury, Ontario, where 10 percent of the world's nickel is mined. The problem is that these reports described Sudbury 30 years ago, not today. Yes, nickel mining is a nasty business, but in the 1970s, Sudburians started to clean up the mining mess and make huge strides in rehabilitating their environment. As Canadian Geographic declared recently in giving one Sudbury group an award for restoration, "Once derided for its barren landscape, Sudbury, Ontario, has experienced an environmental makeover since the 1970s. Today, the former industry-blighted moonscape has been transformed." In any case, Prius batteries, which contain 32 pounds of nickel each, require only a fraction of the world's supply. More than 94 percent of the 1.55 million tons of nickel mined each year is used for stainless steel, alloys, and electroplating. So the batteries for the one million hybrids Toyota has sold so far have required only one percent of the world's annual nickel-mining production. Since the estimates on nickel recycling indicate about 80 percent is being reused, a million Priuses' share of newly mined nickel would really only be about two-tenths of one percent. Additionally, Toyota researchers say that a Prius battery will last for at least 180,000 miles. There's no reason to believe that the company is inflating its figures, for the simple reason that Toyota issues an eight-year or 100,000-mile warranty on their batteries. Company representatives say that very few batteries have failed and that some fleet cars have already racked up 200,000 miles and the batteries are still going strong. The Prius batteries are also completely recyclable, and Toyota's recycling program even issues a $150 credit when they're finally retired. Finally, after much Hummering and hawing, there remains your question whether you'd be better off getting a "really fuel-efficient regular car." Well, you might. As previously reported here, I've driven another Toyota, the Corolla, and gotten 42 miles per gallon, a mile more than its official EPA rating. That's pretty competitive with the Prius, especially when you consider that the Corolla costs about $7,000 less. So that regular car may be a sensible alternative to the Prius, but not because the Prius is environmentally worse than the Hummer.

W owns a Prius!?

No drama. It was pretty stable.

I have hyper-miled the Prius to nearly 80 MPG but it requires a lot of effort and have to drive like an old lady. The best mileage you can get out of the Prius is on city driving where the traffic is light to medium. Running on the freeway don't yield as much as the city. SL traffic is ideal for this car. The picture is my gauge and the car is being driven fairly hard. The worst I've seen is in the high 20s when I spend a whole day in the canyon. Edit: mine is the third gen. Second gen is about 10% less.

Ford Focus?