I had Hybrid Assistant running while my car switched to HV mode the other day, and the SoC got down to 8%. It quickly charged back up to 12% after that. In HV mode it seems to be usually between 12-14%. Has anyone seen lower than 8%?
I rarely run the battery down as my trips tend to be short a well spaced to allow judicious wall charging but I have run it down to 0% and 1% on two occasions.
I don’t know the percentage since I don’t have Hybrid assistant but I did run the battery down to what I would’ve considered 2 bars in the old Prii. I was driving in EV Mode up a mountain and when it switched to HV, it was still using the battery during warm-up. Thus, the battery drained down to whatever the minimum is (which is typically the equivalent of two bars in the old car’s). It did look quite empty. I guess with Li-Ion, you could do 1 bar?
That value on the display is USABLE capacity, hence the 0% observed. ACTUAL capacity is what the aftermarket app informs us about. In this case, that 8% is reasonable for a high-demand engine start.
I don't think there's any reliable way to tell without an app. The car will indicate 0% when it switches to HV mode. And then it no longer displays a percentage but varies between 1-2 bars.
This is the indicated on the dash display, which is showing the in-use range of the battery charge. At 0% indicated, Hybrid Assistant (displaying the actual battery capacity) will show higher (the actual level of charge in the battery). At the high end, a 100% charge on the dash is about 82-83% in Hybrid Assistant.
In this case I was going up a big hill on the highway as the engine was warming up, so that put a higher than usual demand on the battery. It seems to mostly use the battery as the engine is warming up That makes sense to protect the engine while it's cold, and it's probably also for emissions reasons.
Hybrid Assistant consistently shows 84% on my phone, miniVCI, Prime combination. It's not that big a difference, but I think it's clear that there are small variations mostly with the phone. VCI combos being used, but could also be driver based to some degree as well, ie: if the driver uses up EV and lets the car switch to HV consistently while another driver rarely run EV out of EV range for whatever reasons as just one scenario. So what might show up on Hybrid Assistant as 8% for one person might show up as 7% or 9% on someone elses phone. Again no a huge difference but something I think we should all keep in mind when comparing stats from the car.
I run Hybrid Assistant on a tablet in my car and the lowest I've seen is 11%. However, I rarely run till it kicks me out of EV mode. I will note that I do see the "kWh used" in Hybrid Assistant continue to go up even in HV mode, so I do know its still using the battery. My guess is that when the battery is that low, it uses some of the engine power to charge the battery back up to its targeted min (looks like in the 12-14% range) rather than moving the car forward.
Lowest I have seen since i use HA is 11 % I did not have Hybrid assistant at that time but this happened during my first winter with the car.... the blue portion was half eaten maybe this is what 6 - 8 % SoC look like .... who knows ....
So, is this “Hybrid Assistant” app Android-only? I don’t see it in the iPhone App Store. I do see a few possibly-comparable apps though (haven’t looked at them in detail yet).
Yeah, once out of EV range, the scale on the battery is too small to precisely know where they are. After driving Gen3, the first time driving PRIME without EV charge at a dealer for my test drive, I was shocked to see how low the battery level was.
Yes. I have IOS devices for regular use, but run HA on an old Galaxy S4 tablet. They can be had for cheap.
