Looking at the owner’s manual for my 2017 Prius (Page 319), it says the following for Eco drive mode: “Suitable for driving that improves fuel economy by generating torque in response to accelerator pedal operations more smoothly than in normal mode.” Does constantly “generating torque” damage the vehicle and/or require more maintenance due to wear?
no. that is just toyota speak for, 'you have to press the pedal further in eco mode to make the car go'. none of the modes cause more wear than others. your car is well built (on the whole) and will last a long time if taken care of.
I pretty much always use eco mode, and got 295,000 miles out of my 2017 before I handed it down to my daughter a year ago, and who has sadly only put about 2000 additional miles on it! Eco mode will not cause any undue harm.
Thank you for the replies. I always drive in Eco mode. The only times I have not used Eco has been after an oil change. For some reason the techs reset it to regular mode. A couple of times I forgot to change the setting or didn’t realize. I can’t say I noticed a significant difference in the feel of the Prius.
There are some differences, but like you say most of them are hard to notice. One way to notice, at least with the Prime plugin is while in EV mode at 40 to 50 mph, switch from ECO to Power with two quick taps of the button and don't change anything else. It might work the same in the Prii HV mode, but if it does it might not be as noticeable as it is when in full EV.
With our Gen 3 I’ve forgotten these modes (ECO and PWR) even exist, gamely tried ECO for the first few months of ownership, found the gas pedal travel awkwardly long. If anything it’s harder to modulate.
You're misunderstanding the statement above. You can't move a car without generating torque. The hybrid synergy drive always "generates torque" in response to accelerator pedal operations. The important portion in your quote about ECO mode is the portion that says "more smoothly than in normal mode" The opposite would be true of Power mode, it generates torque more aggressively than in normal mode. All the different modes do is change the sensitivity of the accelerator pedal.
When I had my 2017, I mostly drove in ECO mode. One thing I did not like though is that, in ECO Mode, the radar cruise control accelerates too slowly for my taste.
Their picture shows it more clearly than the words: Your go pedal is essentially a game-controller input for telling the car how much go (torque or motive force) you want. With neither ECO nor PWR selected, the game controller has a linear response. Push the go pedal this much further, get this much more go. Select PWR and you get a curve that's concave down. Extra steep where you first go on the pedal; your earliest pedal push asks for a lot of go. This curve has to bend over later to meet up at the same max power as the straight line. Your last few mm of pedal pushing don't make as much difference in this mode. Select ECO and it's the reverse, a curve that is concave up. Your earliest small motions on the pedal don't request a lot of go; you have to press further for that. Here again, the curve has to bend and have the same max power point as the other two. In your last millimeters of pedal push it is responding extra steeply to catch up. In all the modes, the car generates the requested amount of go in the same way; there isn't one that's harder on the car than another (except indirectly, if the modes influence the way you tend to drive).
