Do you wait till your battery drains down or top it off at 1/2 full or more ?

Good point about the 12V battery !

When you don't have a regular daily driving routine it makes it a challenge because you might have a day where you decide that day to do a lot of running and you like to have a full charge, but then you might have a day or two with just a little running,

I would hope having a full charge does not cause big mileage reduction within even 5-10 years.

 

Interesting point, thanks, since I'm retired and we rarely travel outside our small town, charging our Prime once or twice a week is usually enough to keep us driving all week on EV (electric-only) mode.

 

So the thing is what does Toyota consider a "long" period of time ?

An earlier reply (see above) seems to indicate a month would be the limit.

 

We don't leave it fully charged every night, I'll fully charge it one evening during the week usually finishing the charge by about 1AM or so, then that one full charge usually will last us most of the week if not the whole week before needing recharged again. So it usually will only sit fully charged maybe one night a week.

 

I'm retired but my wife still wanted to keep working part time about 4 days a week, but she uses our Kia Soul for her short 2 mile (each way) commute to work so that way the Kia doesn't sit unused. We use the Prime for most of our other running like going to local stores and other errands, much of which we'll do on her days off. I'll occasionally run an errand/shopping other days with the Prime. Since we live in a small town the most distance (one way) we usually travel is about 2 miles, so we can run to several local stores and get back home maybe using about 5-6 miles. The most recent time I went to recharge it it said 5 hours 30 minutes to full charge so it still had a little juice left because it will say 5 hours 50 minutes to full charge on the times we do run it all the way down.

 

Good point, every family's driving situation will determine what is best for them, some might use all the EV range each day, others might have a full charge last several days to a week or even more.

We basically do the same somewhat, I might not wait till the battery is 100% depleted if I know the EV miles left on the previous charge is pretty low to where the next day we drive it the EV will run out before be are done driving for that day. Our most recent charge showed we got it fairly close to being depleted, I estimated we had about 1 1/2 - 2 miles EV range left when I charged it.

Congrats on having free charging stations along your driving route, nothing wrong with getting a free charge when possible

We live in a small town and there are no charging stations here yet so we have done all our charging at home so far. There are many charging stations around the nearest big city about 25 miles away but we rarely travel there and so far the times we do go there is no charging station at the stores we might go to. I had been hoping more restaurants would get free charging stations so customers could get a free charge while eating their meal but understandingly right now restaurants are usually carry out only unless they have outside eating areas. There is at least one charging station about 15 miles away, but unless we have a reason to be in that area long enough to charge it makes more sense for us just to charge at home.