CT200h after a year

I've been driving the Lexus CT200h purchased by my Company for one year. In that time, I've put 20,343 miles on the odometer and put 394.351 gallons of fuel in the vehicle. This has resulted in a year-long average of 50.6 miles/gallon. The EPA estimate for the vehicle is 42 m.p.g. for city and highway combined. I've exceeded that by 20.5%. Had I gotten the 42 m.p.g., I'd have burned 484 gallons, so my driving habits saved about 90 gallons of regular, which would have cost about $350 and released about 1,700 pounds of carbon dioxide.


Had I continued to drive the Land Rover LR3 HSE I had prior to the Lexus, I'd have burned something like 970 gallons of premium gasoline, 576 gallons more. These 576 gallons would have released about 5.5 tons of carbon dioxide. That Land Rover has now been recycled (unfortunately, not by design).


The car is by no means spacious, nor is it a rabbit or a greyhound. That's to be expected and I did expect it. But it does put lie to those who claim that the CAFE standard of 54.5 by the year 2025 would have us all driving battery powered, beer can skinned econoboxes. Were I to employ more exotic techniques of hypermiling, such as pulse and glide, I'm sure that I could achieve that today. Of course, we can't rely on everyone to drive as I do now, and pulse and glide is more work than even I want to devote to driving. But with 12 model years to go, it's pretty hard to believe that this cannot be accomplished.