Yes, or with the EV button I can get there faster and not piss of the guy behind me. I understand it'll automatically do that IF I keep the throttle below the half mark. But, with the EV button it'll do a similar thing, AND allow me to accelerate faster. Sounds like a win to me.
It seems simple to me. When the car needs more power than the electrics can provide, it leaves EV mode and goes into HV mode. The same can be said for low battery, higher speeds, warming up the engine, or a few more reasons I haven't thought of. The Prius isn't an EV, after all.
Yes and with my C, for instance, being stuck in a crawling traffic jam seems to be the only practical use for it.......to supposedly keep the ICE from starting if you press the gas pedal just a tad too hard to go from 0-5 and move 10 feet. As stated, however, even that gains you little or nothing of practical value because eventually the ICE will start anyway when it needs to for low battery charge or something else and it has to make up for that electricity used sometime.
Ah, but it also takes some amount of energy to spin up the engine during the start process. Also, while it's spinning up it's blowing fresh air into the exhaust, so the computer probably starts off with slightly rich mixture until it can trust the O2 readings and go closed loop (just guessing on that). So I figure it takes several seconds for the engine to be generating power efficiently and to pay back the energy cost of spinning up the engine. However, when the battery does get low, or the ICE gets cold (had to use the acronym there), the engine will come on and stay running for a short while, thus making any start up cost negligible. In reality, I don't actually use EV mode very often because it's unpredictable. I prefer to either creep along in the left half of the HSI, or wait until the gap in front of me is such that I can stay in the right half for more than few seconds. It sort of a low-speed, somewhat traffic friendly pulse and stealth technique.
