I am a newbie to Prius, I just bought a used 2012 Prius III at 121,998 miles from a Toyota Dealer. There are 3 driving mode beside EV mode. A regular mode (no light on), an Eco mode (Eco light on) and a Power Mode (Power mode light on). Which of the three modes should I drive to preserver traction battery life? I drive either Regular or Power Mode, the Eco mode is too weak to pick up speed at a stop! Is there any particular items or 'Do's and Don't I need to know at 121,998 miles? Thanks,
The various modes simply remap the throttle response. In other words, in ECO mode, you’d press the gas pedal further to get equivalent acceleration to the POWER mode. I think ECO mode also reduces the amount of time the car’s Climate Control can be on too. Other than normal scheduled Toyota maintenance for a Prius with that many miles, I’d clean the EGR system stem to stern. Since you bought the car from a Toyota dealer, I’d verify what they may have done to the car to prepare it for sale.
If it has not been done, drain and fill the transaxle with ATF WS, and replace two washers/gaskets, DIY about $40, at a dealer, about $110
I floor thru yellow lights and red to green lights on ECO with no problems. You must be pressing too light.
Congrats and welcome! You can’t do much to help or hurt the battery, other than purposely trying to keep it in ev a lot, or parking in the sun in hot climates. If you don’t drive much, get a 12v battery maintainer. Check out nutzabiutbolts YouTube videos, especially the egr cleaning and etc. All the best
I like the throttle response in Normal (aka Regular). I find ECO tiresome/maddening: way too much pedal travel, hard on the leg. As far as I know, none of the modes making any difference to battery life, they're just changing gas pedal response.
For anyone looking to geek-out on some hard core Prius data... heres a deep dive by the US Dept. of Energy . There are charts, bar graphs, good Lord... even a histogram! https://publications.anl.gov/anlpubs/2010/06/67317.pdf The following is clipped from the study: 7.1 Eco and Power Modes The Prius provides the driver with selectable Eco and Power modes which change the accelerator pedal mapping for the vehicle. Using the various modes on the Urban cycle, minimal fuel economy change was observed. Figure 30 shows the tested Urban fuel economy for the Prius operating in Standard, Power, and Eco mode. The observed variation in fuel economy is well within expected test-to-test variation and should be considered minimal. Figure 30: Standard, Power, and Eco Mode Urban Warm Fuel Economy Given the nature of pedal signal remapping, these results are reasonably expected over a prescribed drive trace. Despite this fact, real-world fuel economy is likely to improve when running in Eco mode due to the smoothed accelerator demand and additional effort required to drive the vehicle aggressively. For comparison, Figure 31 shows the pedal position over the same portion of the Urban cycle for the Standard, Eco, and Power modes.
Yeah, those results are about what I'd expect between ECO and STANDARD if someone was passively driving. I think the value of ECO is for drivers that are actively trying to get max power yet keep the ICE from starting. In other words, getting as close as possible to the line but not going over.
I agree. I find that I do get a little better economy in ECO, but not much. It makes it easier to keep the power band in the ECO area and it lightens the HVAC load a little. But it's not a big difference. I go back and forth. But as to @ePRIU$'s original question, it won't make any difference at all to the life of the traction battery. Best thing you can do for that is to use sun screens or park in the shade in hot weather and don't deliberately try to force it to drive in EV more than the computer wants it to. Now that it's out of hybrid warranty, you might consider a Prolong grid charger to keep the cells balanced. There are lots of threads here about it.
