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Just a heads up folks, I have a Prius Excel with the JBL premium sound system. By mistake, I forgot to convert some of my FLAC lossless recordings to mp3 and just loaded them to my USB stick. Way Hay!!! The system plays them perfectly. 192/24bit, 352/24bit, it plays the lot. So I've removed the mp3's and added all my music in FLAC format. The handbook doesn't mention that the system can play FLAC files, but it does beautifully and the results are breath-taking.

There is a lot of work going on into producing Hydrogen e.g. Glasgow University announce d a year or so ago that they had found a method that was 30x better than previous. Similarly there is a lot of work going on into batteries as there probably isn't enough lithium for everybody to go EV/PHEV. As we say up here , it will all come out in the wash ...

Wow. Just come back from holiday and found this post. Has it been resurrected from 7 years ago? My advice to anyone is to head over to fuelly.com and check out real world mpg figures for all sorts of vehicles and when comparing different vehicles, make sure you are comparing like with like. So for a toyota hybrid, you should compare with similar sized automatic transmission vehicles. Or for fun, compare pretty much any Prius with manual diesel cars.

I had my air con serviced a few weeks ago at a Toyota dealer. They noted that there was very little refrigerant left in it so they had topped it up and also added a dye. I then had to return the car after a week and they would check for leaks - the dye indicating where the leak was. When I returned they found the leak to be due to an faulty o-ring. This will be replaced and the refrigerant topped up this weekend. I would have expected your dealer to have done something similar. Why not return and see what they can do? By the way, I was charged £59 for the original service and £99 to repair the leak. Hope that helps.

Looking at the purchase price of the two cars, the outlander is about £10k+ for a top spec plug in car compared to the top spec Rav. So plug-in cars are more pricey to buy in the 1st place so a smaller amount of cars on the road. You would be buying plug-in cars to make a statement, if you really cared about the environment in the 1st place you would by a 2nd hand car and convert that to LPG. Hybrid, plug-in.... all cons... The reason i bought a brand new Rav.... I wanted a up to date safety packed car for the kids. Probably keep this 10 years like our last Rav, and it just so happens to be hybrid.

When the Toyota garage serviced your air con last year they should have found the leak and told you about it. They are supposed to evacuate the system, weighing the existing charge in the process, then isolate the system under vacuum to check for leakage. They should not have (and I don't believe they would have) re-charged the system with a known leak. So possibly your system had developed a leak some time after it was charged. It might even be something other than a leak eg a fault with the compressor. I'd get an independent garage to check it out (most of them have the equipment and someone who is familiar with A/C systems) since their labour rates are generally lower than the main dealers. It's not a system you can repair yourself.

Although I kind of take your point to a small degree, comparing vehicle tyres to cycle tyres is like comparing apples to oranges. I feel I can knowledgeably comment, as a cyclist myself, that there are a totally whole different set of criteria involved in cycle tyre pressure compared to vehicle tyre pressure. I'm not even really sure there is a cross over, the design and physics of each is totally different. I doubt very much that Toyota have any input into a tyre manufacturer's max sidewall pressure that is stamped on the tyre. The only correct pressure is the one where it is neither under-inflated nor over-inflated and the only way to work that out is to examine the tyre tread wear pattern on a regular basis. Like I said previously, the placarded pressures are a recommended starting point, as it can in no way cover all makes and models of tyre. Also, remember that the internal pressure of tyre changes with the weather/temperature and season, so regular checking and adjustment, by the prudent car owner/driver, is necessary to keep the tyres optimally aired.