RSnyder said:
Graham's wonderful miniscanner provides much of what you request and a whole lot of other things. It is incredibly helpful understanding what the Prius is doing in response to your driving behavior. Unfortunately it only works in the 2001-03 Prius, not the 2004.
In case it wasn't obvious let me publically confess that I was attempting to be sarcastically humorous, to "stir the pot" and was not seriously suggesting a desire for or benefit from a lot of additional instrumentation.
Having been trained as a physicist (mostly experimentalist not ivory tower theorist) I have an appreciation of instrumentation, where appropriate and useful. I have EGT, boost pressure, and tranny temp on my turbo-diesel with automatic. The engine and trany are both NOT STOCK and it is altogether likely that I could "overdo it" if I didn't have feedback from this instrumentation. The Prius is about as foolproof as a modern transportation canister can be made.
I'm not convinced that knowing a lot more information than provided by Toyota is either appropriate or useful the vast majority of the time for the majority of drivers. I suspect the instances where a driver would be able to make an informed beneficial decision to do something different because of having oodles of more instrumentation would be quite limited.
None of the forgoing was to imply that it might not be fun or interesting, just not, for the most part in a majority of instances, practical or useful.
I thiink for the most part it would be like listening to Mozart while watching it on a real time audio spectrum analyzer but not having access to any controls but the volume. You couldn't "DO" much about any instrumentation based observations.
Except for the distraction to the driver (there are already enough of those) it won't hurt anything but someone's pocketbook. I think it would allow most drivers to make beneficial adjustments to the car's performance along the same magnitude as changing the color of the paint and interior upholstery.
The best mileage enhancing instrument I have ever seen for standard gasoline fueled ICE powered vehicles (Otto cycle) has been the vacuum gauge set up to read manifold vacuum since it so strikingly demonstrates the immediate deleterious effect of excess throtle depression. Those simple times are history as regards vehicles of the complexity and sophistication of the Prius.
That said, I do keep an open mind and am more than willing to entertain an argument to the contrary, especially if presented in a complete consistant logical manner. I learn the most when shown to be wrong.

Pat
