Most Obscure Prime Facts (Way Out There)

So far I’ve found three different ways to start charging immediately:
1) After shutting off the car the Charge Now button appears on the main screen while the graphic and music is playing.
2) After plugging the EVSE in, open the door and hit the button with the . on the right side of the steering wheel.
3) And with the charge management Entune app


Unsupervised!

 

For those who don't already know it, #3 is only available in the Advanced trim.

I also read somewhere here that unplugging the EVSE from the car and re-plugging it a couple times also initiates a charge now, but I must not have done it right because I couldn't make it happen. For me, it's #1 or #2 and I'm OK with that, although the remote feature of Entune would be nice.

 

If scheduled charging is always set, the discrete Charging Button on the lower left dash brings up the charging choices immediately on the MID. Hit down on the selector, confirm, and you're in the Charge Now Y/N line. Hit Yes, and Enter. Then simply charge the car. This temporarily overrides the charging schedule. It stays in scheduled charging following the charge, if that's what you had.

You could alternately sift through the vehicle settings to find the same interface on the MID, but the button method is far easier.

Personally, I have the car in perpetual charge now mode (no schedule set), as I charge when it is at or near depleted. My round trip work commute is a total of 3.4 miles - the long way!

 

I don't remember seeing this mentioned before. When the sun hits it at just the right angle, the black trim around the 11.6" display glitters with little flecks of blue, gold, red, etc. I just noticed it yesterday.

 

I tried that too after @Mark57 mentioned it in this thread What's the Button Above the Fuel Hatch Release? | PriusChat, but I too failed to override the scheduled charge by doing that. I wonder what I was doing wrong???

 

A little off-topic, but the white on my Liftback steering wheel has glitter in it too.

 

Here's what I do. Plug it in, wait for the brick to "click", unplug it. Repeat. Most times it will start charging after the second time. Occasionally, it takes a third unplug/replug. There's probably a certain amount of time in between plugins that it likes to see.

 

OK, I will give a try next time I start charging. I am currently on a freshly filled tank of gas with winter tires changed to OEM AS tire and doing mpg calculation. To make sure my number is purely from gas, I have not been charging since the tire change last week.

By the way, early indication on my purely gas only mpg before and after tire change is almost 10mpg difference. Of course, warmer weather is a big factor, but I did not see this much of jump when I was driving Gen3 and changed tires. I wonder why this happened on PRIME.

 

My '09 was opposite my wife's '06

Um, I have a stalk in my Prime.

Annoying since '04. Why is forward not forward, there is no mechanical connection. Because they modeled it after manual transmissions that had R upper left. I've never owned or driven a car built that way, 1st was upper left, 2nd below that. R was bottom right. Old VWs had "push down and rotate counter clockwise" to get to R. Some people ran into that on an episode of the Amazing Race some years back. And yes, the cars were old, not current models. I only know about it because my step-sister had a '60s era bug.

Key? What is this key thing you speak of?

Yeah, WHY would we want to got through reverse to get to drive? The only more annoying thing is the gated automatic shifters. Right, down, left, down/

And like all Prii before (at least to Gen II, don't know about the Gen I) no reason to even use the Park button unless you want to have the car stopped but will not be shutting it down like at a drive up ATM. It puts itself in Park when it shuts down. Can't get my wife to accept that it really does work and she's been driving her '06 from when it came off the lot 210K miles ago. Always presses the P button with her thumb then the Power button with her index finger.

 

Yep forgot about charging button on the dash.


Unsupervised!

 

Yes, and it is way down there low! Just about unreachable. What a stupid location for such things. Thanks, Toyota. At least they've finally moved the seat heater buttons up to the driving mode selector console in the '19 models of Prii. It took them only 10 years or more to realize that customers didn't like reaching down to unviewable locations.

 

Shifting to reverse disables the seatbelt chime. I guess Toyota decided the continuous beeping, parking assist beeping, and seatbelt chime dinging all at the same time might be too much.

 

But they insist on distracting pop ups on the display for non-critical alerts. Personally I would rather have the one time chime symphony if they removed the non-critical pop ups.

 

You can make the blue dash lights will come on when not being charged.

Did a little snooping around and found out a few things needed to make the lights come on.
1. Car must be plugged in. (schedule is needed or else it will begin charging when plugged in)
2. Car must be locked.
3. Fob must be within ~4 feet of driver's door.

Also, SOC has a bearing on what lights are lit. I tried a few different SOC's:
~10% far right light.
~50% two far right lights.
~85% all three lights.

The lights will stay on for ~15 seconds with the fob within ~4 feet of driver's door or ~7 seconds if the fob is moved farther away.

 

The MID screen that displays drive time (meaning systems are "ON" and ready to drive) can not display past 99:59 hours. It begins again at 00:00. Currently, mine is at 15 hours, or actually 115 hours. This is on a 2017, so maybe they've updated the ability to go past 100 hours, just like they updated the MPG to display past 199.9.

 

Is that for a Trip meter? I reset my TripB every refuel, but the time has never been larger than max. The longes between reset was 69 hours. But I have not reset my ODO and TripA corresponding time since the purchase two years ago, so they have cycled more than 10 times by now.

 

Yes. I use Trip B and reset it at every tank of that liquid fuel stuff. Mine is now at actual 116 hours, but reading as 16 hours. I also have never reset Trip A, and it matches to within 0.3 miles of the odometer.