My new 2019 PPP

Yes, I've got a couple of them - and yes, I'll run say a drill recharger through it while partly coiled - but any load, it has to be uncoiled.

 

When you brake late you waste energy in a couple ways. First, you're going to most likely need more friction braking and will reduce or even eliminate regeneration. Second, when you stay "on the gas" longer than needed, you're using more gas or electricity than needed to get to where you're going to stop. If you're going to have to stop anyway, why use power (money) to get there if you don't have to? When traffic permits me to stop properly from 60 mph, I will usually regenerate about a half mile of battery range and sometimes more than that. When the light turns on me at the last second, I regenerate almost nothing. It's just gas or electricity thrown away as if I wasn't even driving a hybrid.

If you mean dynamic radar cruise control (DRCC), then that's something I don't use in town. Only on long trips where I do find it handy. I still use regular cruise control in town sometimes when I'm lazy but I keep a finger on that cruise control stalk so I can disengage it in a heartbeat when I see slowdowns ahead. The DRCC doesn't anticipate well. But normally, in town, I can get better efficiencies and higher eco scores without the cruise control. This morning, traffic was fairly cooperative and I got a 95 on my 9.5 mile commute.

 

Greetings and Welcome Aboard!

Everybody has already hit all of the highlights.

Relax and enjoy the new car.
'Yes' to extension cords. Outdoor rated. Short and fat (somewhat like yours truly)
'No' to unnecessarily fretting about MPG for at least the first 3-4 tanks.
'Yes" to getting a dial-type tire gauge and using it semi-occasionally to measure cold tire pressure.

Read.
Read.
Read.

Read the manual.
Read the Warranty and maintenance guide.

BUT most importantly....read other's experiences in the forum.
Then in a little while you'll be the subject matter expert and you'll be able to share your knowledge and adventures.

But mostly?
Relax and enjoy the new car.
That's what new cars are for.....

Good Luck!

 

Always good advice!

 

I do the same thing - but with DRCC, flick it off just the same as normal cruise.

And yes, you're right - you can get better litres/100km with a smooth accelerator - but for most people and in some driving situations, DRCC will be better. I have to be in the right mood to HyperMile, and it has to be somewhere where there isn't much traffic.

 

Ditto on all points.

 

I don't think it's really empty as you see that 1/5 of the battery symbol on the screen is still blue, about 20% charge still left in the traction battery.

 

I gave up on EV Auto a long time ago. I also live in a flat area. As I understand it, the EV Auto is really just EV unless the engine is warmed up. Then the car will switch back & forth between EV & HV choosing the mode that's most efficient for the conditions. I just manually switch, using EV on the slower speeds and HV at the higher speeds and try to be sure to use all the EV before I get home if I'm going far enough to finish it off.

You have two batteries: the auxiliary 12V and the traction or HV battery. The small battery is not a starter battery. Most people call it the 12V or the aux battery. It just fires up the computers and closes the relay that connects the HV battery to the car. You could say that it wakes up the car. MG1 starts the engine and it's powered by the traction battery.
[Edit to add the following picture from the owner's manual]

The traction battery gets charge whenever you decelerate by coasting or by light to moderate use of the brakes. It makes no difference if you're above or below the state of charge that enables EV driving. If the hill is long enough, you'll be able to charge it enough to once again show EV range, but the first number you see will probably be about 0.6 miles. Not sure what the percentage would be. But at that point you can put it in EV and use it up like that or put it right back in HV and lock in that range. And at any time, you can press the EV/HV button for a couple seconds to put the car in charge mode although that's not a very good use of your gas.

 

What you're already doing sounds like the best way to use EV and HV mode. EV Auto isn't going to do any better, because it can't anticipate driving conditions ahead of you or later in the day. I think consolidating the number of times the engine warms up will be best for it in the long run. For example using EV auto on your morning commute might cause the engine to run if the weather is cold or if you need too much acceleration on the highway (going up big hills or flooring it excessively). The engine might run for a few minutes then and also a few minutes on the way home. It would be better to let the engine do all of it's work at once, so it only has to warm up once. That lets it spend more time running efficiently, and lets it fully warm up to eliminate any condensation from running slightly cold.

 

You're welcome. And your friend is right. Just drive it. Sometime when you have nothing better to do, get on the freeway in EV mode with a cold engine and switch to HV mode while keeping one eye on the mpg indicator. Guess what, it stays pegged or nearly pegged for a while. That's because even though you're in hybrid mode, the electric drive is doing most of the work until the engine warms up and runs cleaner. It's part of what makes this almost a zero emissions vehicle. As the engine warms up, it'll take more of the load. When it's warmed up enough it will get low mpg while it pays back the "energy loan" it borrowed from the battery. It's an amazing car.

Also, I always recommend downloading the PDF version of the manual from Toyota's owners' website. Then you can have it on your computer, your tablet, your phone, whatever. And you can search for any word you want. I don't even have a paper manual. Then spend some time with the manual. You'll discover all sorts of treats. This is NOT your grandfather's Oldsmobile.

 

The car is designed to work well without thinking about it or understanding it. But most of us here are too curious to leave good enough alone. The "drag" she felt is just different accelerator pedal programming between HV mode and EV mode. It's probably worst in Eco drive mode. It's really annoying, but not anything mechanical.

jerrymildred is right, the car warms up the engine before using it. It's safe to manually switch it to HV mode any time. I've noticed in rare cases when the battery can't supply enough power for a given accelerator input, the engine might come on and start working immediately. But it's unpredictable so there's not much you can do to avoid it, other than preemptively warm up the engine if you think it might be needed. That usually happens when the battery is cold, for example if it sits outside for several days without charging in the winter. I need to do some more experimentation to see how short the warm-up time is in this case. From what I've seen since battery output becomes quickly and sharply limited, the only choice is for the engine to start working right away. For example on a recent drive I saw the discharge current limit quickly drop to 22kW (with a warm fully charged battery it's around 68kW). It normally takes more than 30kW to maintain speed going up this hill on the highway near where I live, but on this drive I expected this to happen since the battery was cold, so I let my speed drop to 40 to see if I could make it with the engine off. Toyota doesn't want you to lose power unexpectedly, so presumably the engine would make up the difference if your accelerator pedal position was calling for more than 22kW of power.

I think this hill is nearly a worst-case scenario for engine warm-up. If you're driving on a flat section of highway the engine will usually come on as the steady state power hits about 3/4 of the discharge current limit, so that gives it time to warm up and some margin for acceleration from the battery as it warms up. And if the battery is too cold, the engine will probably start immediately when you start the car. In other words, don't worry about my rambling in the previous paragraph, because it seems to be a very rare situation.

 

Whenever I drive Prime, I'm thinking the technology used on this car is like that from a rocket science.
I think it's even more sophisticated than what's in most Tesla if not all.
With all the rebates, credits and discounts I have received, it comes out I paid less than $20,000 for my Prime XLE.
Now that's a real bang for the buck!

 

I also use DRCC most of the time, and one thing that was different from my prior car with auto cruise is that you can control the aggressiveness of DRCC acceleration by changing from ECO/Normal/Power modes, which is pretty awesome.