Getting ready for 1st Road Trip..."B" shift question

B is a way to make the 4cylinders revolve and with friction slow you down, the brake pedal on the other hand, will not touch the brake pads but charge your traction battery till the cows come home
B is for stealth in a 30 mph zone, not for continual use on mt passes.

 

No, that's entirely wrong. Click and Clack put it like this:

Dear Tom and Ray:

We recently bought a 2008 Prius and just love it, love it, love it. But we're having a bit of a discussion about how to use the "B" on the gearshift. I say it's like a downshift, and you should use it only temporarily, while going down a steep hill or coming to a stop. You use it to save the brakes, then return to "D." My husband thinks it's fine to drive most of the time in the "B" mode, since it regenerates electricity and recharges the battery. Who's correct? And if "B" is the gear to use all the time, why didn't Toyota just call it "D" and forget the separate braking option? -- Gayle

TOM: Gayle, you're 100 percent right, and your husband, unfortunately, has his head up his brake line.

Here's Hobbit's more technical writeup.

 

I took my Prius C on a road trip last summer and was on US 50 from Ely, Nevada all of the way through Utah and Colorado and into Kansas. It's a really fun drive. I'd like to go back and do it again one day. For what it's worth, I never used the "B" setting at all.

 

Top Speed for a C is 104 MPH so that is the top speed for B as well. Very few of those passes will need B, but it will be safe on all of them. (I would use B if there is more than a 600 foot drop)

 

Well they got one tiny portion right. B under the D in the Drive gears? | PriusChat

 

I have limited experience of driving a Prius in mountains. What I found worked was to use B when my rate of descent in D became faster than I wanted. If I was still descending too quickly then I used the brake pedal as well.

It was quite interesting to have the Prius make a noise rather like a truck braking using it's "Jake brake" once the battery was full. Also one very strange experience which does not happen in any other car; when the slope flattens out a bit and you need to lightly press the accelerator to maintain the speed you want, the speed of the engine will actually decrease as it provides less braking effort - very non-intuitive.

 

I drive a mountain road daily and use B exactly as described above- when there are curves, it it really wonderful! And, the bonus is that at my 25k check up. my brakes were still in the "like new" range!

 

As Jimbo already suggested, max safe speed in 'B' should be the same as in 'D'. At least that is how it works in the regular Liftback, and I've seen nothing to indicate that the others are different.

We crossed Nevada last year, mostly on US-50 but with a diversion to the even lonier SR-2. I'm not recalling it as equaling the mountain descent stresses of some Colorado and Wyoming roads where 'B' was essential.

 

B does not do what you would intuitively think. There are other threads on this board that cover it. Here is one of them:

B under the D in the Drive gears? | PriusChat

That thread includes the following link with a detailed description of B:

http://techno-fandom.org/~hobbit/cars/b-mode.html

 

As I noted in post #3 above!

Hobbit is one of our best Prius experts (and an old friend).

 

Oops! I didn't realize we were referencing the same web page.

I remember how excited I was about B mode when I first got my car. Learning what it really did was a little deflating. On the other hand, it's a lot easier not to have to shift to B in order to get the best possible mileage.

 

I always drove manual transmission cars before I bought my Prius, so the purpose of the B mode was immediately clear to me.

 

We have a sticky in the Technical Discussion here.

 

In 5 years in the North East I used B only rarely. On a recent drive from Boulder to Aspen and back I used it at least a dozen times.

 

I live in a mountainous area and I use B often. A few weeks ago I went to the dealer for an oil change and they told me that my breaks are still at 80% @ 38,000 kilometers.

 

As fast as the car can go, that is still safe. B does not change any gearing. (nothing ever changes any gearing in any Prius) If there WAS a top speed, Toyota would protect you from doing something stupid, you can't shift into P or R over 5 MPH as an example.

Nevada will have very high, laxly enforced, speed limits.