Some insider notes on the 2017 Prius Prime

Disclaimer - I am not familiar with the Gen I PIP arrangement, so bear with me...

I noticed on the Prime that there are two battery vents - each one outboard of the rear seat backs. I understand the need for additional cooling air flow for the higher capacity battery, but, do the two ducts converge into one blower or are there two separate ducts, each with its own blower? Just curious...

 

i don't know about prime, but gen 1 has 2 ducts and 2 cooling fans. there are pics here somewhere.

 

I don't recall where I read it, but I think that the prime doesn't have a forced air cooling system for the batteries. It doesn't make sense, but I remember seeing it.

 

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that, like the Li-ion battery needed to make a three-row Prius v for JDM, it just pushed the price past what Toytoa thought the U.S. market would bear. An option isn't worth offering if it sells in too low a volume.

 

It's not. It just takes up more space than under the cargo floor of the Prius.

It ain't small. It is over a third of the size of the base pack in the Leaf. A car that doesn't have to also package an engine, with attending fuel, exhaust, and emission systems, nor leave enough buffer in the pack to ensure a long enough life to cover the attending federal and CARB warranties for said emission systems.

The Powerwall is a box that holds batteries. In a car, the batteries have to be placed around exhaust, structural, safety, and suspension systems while also having space for any battery cooling systems that have to contend with the exhaust system and the car sitting under a hot sun instead of inside a building.

It was a silly complaint. At the low range, ICE cars have around 400 miles, enough to cover a week of longer commutes, and on long trips, most don't, or can't, go farther than that before stopping anyway. The Prii are over 500 miles range, not counting daily charging. That's just icing for the large majority of drivers. In PHEV, more gas in the tank, isn't protection against it going stale anyway.

Aside: if stopping at a station to fuel up is so much preferable to daily plugging in, why do people want to minimize the number of times they have to do so?

The difference between the gen1 PHEV and gen3 Prius fuel tank was only about a gallon. Even with the smaller tank, most PHEV owners would go less often to the gas station than the Prius owner because of the grid powered miles.

I don't think anyone can truthfully answer that until they take it apart or get the service manuals. The pack under the seat could be separated from the one in the cargo area for all we know.

 

there's a nice video here showing mechanical graphic drawing. it shows the pack as one big rectangle. can we trust it?
MERGED

this would be hard to believe. no cooling fans?

 

It's been done before... by Nissan with the LEAF.

I would be surprised if Toyota didn't have actively controlled forced air cooling.

 

just read a post from paradox, chief engineer said pretty much the same as pip 1.

 

I was confused by the term "active cooling". I thought that a fan forced air flow would meet the definition of "active". Oops!

 

agreed. did someone say it was inactive? pip 1 has two active fans.
MERGED

how can they possibly trust 'focus groups'? how do they represent a cross section of the driving public?
when something doesn't sell well, (insert venza here) do they blame the focus groups?

 

and a success may have nothing to do with the focus groups. so what have we learned?

 

Was this vehicle made the "fans"? Which one of you said a 4 seater in a midsized vehicle was a good idea.

Prius 3rd Gen couldve probably been 60mpg without the that middle seat. They wanted an efficient vehicle right? The login... I'm more bitter because that was absolutely a deal breaker.

Not the fact it could've been 15 miles ev, or 20 or that it looked different from the gen 4 or is called prime.... Going backwards in seating.. For a prius.

I know so many families that packed their cars for family trips. Now you can unpack your car and put happy meal toys in the center. Like one of those consoles in nice couches.. Ugh

 

not me.Merged

no prob, just include me sometime, because i know exactly what they need.

 

From Autoblog:
Told by Toyota's Nathan Kokes,
"Back to the Prime, which is only a four-seat car. Making the Prime seat only four helps with the overall efficiency, Kokes said. Sure, there's a 3.3-kW charger taking up some space under the rear seat, but that could be moved if necessary. But, by eliminating the possibility of someone sitting in the middle back seat, the engineers could take out some structural weight. "They'd have to add more reinforcement just based upon how the tolerance is of passengers," Kokes said. "You've got to add another 250 pounds right there for that passenger because of us big Americans. This design, it was better to have four seats. In the future, there might be some changes, but for right now [this is it]."

My wife says "No fifth seat; No Prime" and I say, "No eAWD and my 2004 Prius has to last another year."

JeffD

 

Disappointing.
The original Insight was the hybrid that focused on maximizing efficiency. The XL1 took this to a farther extreme with a PHEV.
From the beginning, the Prius was about high efficiency and low emissions while still being a functional family car.

When we finally see the actual cargo space numbers, I don't think people will be as disappointed in the Prime's cargo floor as they are now. The lack of the fifth seat is a deal breaker for many families. Toyota would have known this if they had paid any attention to the five years of comments about the gen1 Volt.

 

Another thing about weight constraints is with our pip - we abuse it and love it. We used all 5 seats and towed a floating thule box with a spare on a 700 mile round-trip camping trip. Charged once but of course looking for chargers on the way but found none.

Anyway. We had probably a 150 lb kid in one seat, a 75 in another and car seat with a toddler in the middle. Tents and blankets, bags out back with the spare and other camping gear in the thule

Got 46 mpg without trying. We had a hitch installed and we utilize it. Others have racks on their roofs on pips. The point is, if there already is a weight limit there's less utility to do all these things.

The "new possible" becomes the new "impossible" but with longer ev range..