Anyone used Gen-1 Prius for PHEV?

The Enginer kit was mainly designed for highway use only. Dont expect to drop the kit into a gen 1 Prius and expect to be able to do a lot of EV driving. The gen 1 Prius does not have a forced EV mode and the Enginer battery can only output about 12A which is good for at best 20-25MPH on level roads if you could force EV.

If you do a lot city driving the Enginer kit should help. If you do a lot of highway driving the kit should help a lot more.

I have the Hymotion battery in my 2006 Prius so I really can only give you what I understand about the Enginer battery.

 

Hi adric22,
I have ordered a Gen1 kit for my brothers car but will not do the install for a month or two. I have spoke with several that have the Enginer kit installed in a Gen1.

None of the Enginer kits interface with the Prius computer. The Enginer kit is designed to recharge the NIMh pack to keep it at 70% until the Enginer LiFePo4 batteries go to their low point. Then the Enginer kit turns itself off and you drive with a normal Prius Hybred.

It is incorrect to say that the enginer kit is for Hiway only or that it does not do EV. All this depends on your driving stile and how far you go.

The Prius with Enginer will do the same level of EV as the Prius with no PHEV. In Gen1 you cannot force EV but you can with careful peddle action run electric only until the NiMh pack drops to a low SOC. With the Enginer kit you can do this maybe twice as long till the 12a limits the recharge. But if you stop at a light or at the store(if you leave the system on) then the recharge will hapen and you can go electric only with carefull use of the peddle again. In general, Enginer claims to give you 10 Enginer recharged miles for 20 total miles driven.

This is not be the same as what Hymotion gives, but Enginer is much lower cost and I think you may not even be able to put the Hymotion kit into a Gen1.

My brother asked the same question about the tire well. I do not yet know your answer. The Enginer box is about 7in high and is bolted to the trunk floor above the tire. I have heard of people puting 2kwhr into the tire well but I do not know about 4kwhr. My best guess is that you can do 4kwhr if you have the top of the batteries about 2-3in above the top of the tire. This is probubly a good compomise.

Hope this is helpful,
Thanks,
Dan Lander

 

Yup, you are right. I forgot about those pictures. I think they did that just to give you the idea of what they are doing. This will not come up on the Prius display.

Thanks,
Dan

 

First, the modified MFD seen on Enginers website is a photoshoped picture (they should really say that on their website, it's a bit misleading). You won't get any updates to your display.

Second, you are correct that the Gen-1 Prius does not have any sort of factory or "forced" EV mode, though once the engine is warm I believe it can still power the vehicle at slow speeds if you have a very careful foot (known as stealth mode to some and generally is taken advantage of by hyper-milers).

Third, the Gen-1 Prius battery pack has a nominal voltage of 273.6v which is much higher than the Gen-2 Prius battery pack of 201.6v. You have to make sure that the system you are getting is configured for (and capable of outputting to) the higher voltage. I assume they've thought of this already.

Fourth, Hymotion is incompatible with the Gen-1 Prius for three reasons: 1) The already mentioned higher voltage would require them to reconfigure their battery pack. 2) Crash testing and emissions testing would need to be redone and frankly it isn't worth it since there aren't that many Gen-1 Priuses being converted. 3) The Gen-1 Prius doesn't use CANBUS, which is how the Hymotion system is able to monitor and report the battery information.

Fifth, TheForce is correct when he said that the Enginer system will not maximize your EV range in the Gen-1 Prius (Some may say that the 100+ MPG rating for the Gen-1 Prius Enginer kit is misleading in that regard). Sorry folks, that's just not how it works...Any sort of "EV" range you might get out of said vehicle would be by using hypermiling techniques (which I'm not attacking in any way, but some would think it's unfair to say that the conversion will automatically get you "EV" range in a car that actually requires you to significantly alter your driving habits).

Sixth, again remember that the Prius engine (all generations) are very finely tuned instruments and allow for great mileage in a non-PHEV vehicle because they are so efficient (obviously the battery helps out, but still the engine is extremely efficient). On that note, Priuses get better mileage on the highway because the engine is more efficient at higher RPMs. When the RPM of the engine is lowered by a higher battery state of charge (it uses more electricity to prevent overcharging the battery thus the engine spins slightly slower) the engine can become less efficient because it operates lower on the RPM chart. You still may see good instantaneous mileage while cruising but when you average everything out over an entire drive it probably won't be as big of a difference as you're hoping because the system is inserting just enough energy to bring the engine out of its sweet spot (this has been observed by Argonne National Labs with some conversions). A stronger DC/DC style system like Hymotion is able to output more current (30+ amps instead of 12) and allows for a greater offset of energy which lessens this effect.

In conclusion, if you really want a conversion for your Gen-1 Prius then I think Enginer is your only option at this point, but I would get some hard data including complete tank averages from people who have the system installed first. I know a lot of people reset their mileage screen for every drive but this does not provide helpful or useful data for purchasing a system.

Andrew

 

My thoughts on this (I think about it a lot )

The cost of batteries has dropped a huge amount since the Prius was introduced in 1987.

If you are into do it yourself then second hand cells are getting more common and with messing, batteries are easily repaired.

The car knows the state of charge from the feedback taps on the battery. Currently this is a passive circuit and the computer allows the battery to go from 70 to 90 % (or is it 60 to 80). A fairly trivial circuit with op amps will allow this to be changed to allow a higher % and a lower % say 40 to 95 or whatever. That would require no changes to the actual electronics of the system, just a board that intercepted the feedback wires. This is the easy bit.

Now, there are not a huge number of engine sensors, temperature, rotation, carburation so the number of relevant signals fed from the car engine to the computer is quite small. A small micro (PIC or Atmel) could easily trick the ECUs into thinking the engine is connected and working normally. Once that is done then the HV battery could be charged through the onboard electronics ie using the normal HV charge path but replacing the engines electric generators with a plug in supply. This is the hard bit.

It should also be possible to force an EV mode in this way though I haven't got my head round that yet because there are some complications regarding the electric motor behavior I think. This is the very hard bit.

All of which is a bit abstract but provides interesting diversions when washing the dishes.

 

I just purchased my Enginer kit and I feel I must mention that it is really not just a drop in and go kit. Unfortunately, the components seem to have quality problems and battery cells have balancing issues. These issues can all be worked out, but that is an additional cost and messing around. If you aren't prepared to tweak the kit some, I wouldn't even consider it.

 

I'm sorry, I meant that the ICE is more efficient at highway speeds than city driving (thus the ICE alone by itself has a higher MPG), not the car as a whole. I was tired last night =).

Mjolinor, As for converting a Gen-1 Prius into an all electric vehicle...that would be a great deal of work requiring you to replace the hybrid ECU and probably the inverter too since you'd need more power. Effectively you'd be replacing the guts of the car =P. It took some of the best engineers in the automotive industry years to design the Prius...

Andrew

 

Why would you want to convert it to an all electric vehicle you are lugging around a whole lot of ICE that is no use if you do that?

Mine drives just fine for a couple of miles without the engine starting, without having to be over gentle and keeping up with the traffic in urban areas. It starts the engine because the battery is getting flat.

 

My apologies, I misread your initial post. I read: replace the engine WITH another electric generator instead of replace the engine electric generator with another power supply.

Any modification of the motor behavior will require modification of the hybrid ECU since it controls the electric motors directly. You'd still need to effectively replace said controller unfortunately.

Andrew

 

Not understanding this. If the car is in park and the HV ECU says the battery is not charged then the engine will run to charge the HV battery. If you modify the charge state signals to allow more charge then the ECUs in the vehicle cannot know that and the engine will charge the battery to a higher level. This is easy to do with opamps.

Regarding plugging it in to charge it, the same is true. The engine ECU can get all the correct signals to think that the engine is actually running from a micro and the outputs from the generators can be fed from an external source quite easily.

Not saying it is a trivial thing to do but I don't really see any holes in it.

 

I'm still confused by the first bit of your comment. Why would you want to confuse the car into keeping the engine off to prevent charging the battery? That's how the Prius maintains its state of charge and prevents the battery from getting damaged by being over discharged...Are you assuming an extra battery pack is connected?

As for the second part of your post, you're suggesting a method to plug the vehicle in to charge the...OEM battery? Without any extra battery power? What exactly would that gain you besides half a mile of higher-than-normal blended mode driving?

Or perhaps I still don't understand your second part of the question and you are trying to convince the vehicle that the ICE is running so that you will use more electric...power? There are holes in this idea because the Prius will set a DTC because it is expecting to get energy from the engine and it will complain quite loudly if it doesn't (P0A0F, Engine failed to start, I believe). I know you were suggesting using a microcontroller to fool the car into thinking it is running but there would be a great deal of sensors you'd have to fool including artificially raising the voltage at the inverter I believe...There are a great deal of sanity checks in the Prius to prevent things like this from happening.

Andrew

 

:focus:
Hello Andrew and Mjolinor,
I think you have gone off the topic for this thread. I suggest that you take this discussion to a different thread.

Thanks,
Dan

 

Hi Adric22,
Have you ever blown up a battery or caused other dammage in your work on your complete EV conversion? I am sure that you did. It is part of the learning process.

The Enginer design concept is good. The main problem they are having is with installations where the installer is still learning. Second to that is that the Enginer system is not fool proof and the documentation is not at a level that a DYI person can follow it without the risk of errors. I say this because I have communicated with Three Prong Power and Pacific EV. They are installing Enginer kits with no problems.

Anyway, you need to do your research and make your own choice. Be sure to include research from shops that are having good results as well as geting input from Priuschat.

Thanks,
Dan