I am hoping someone here can tell me when Prius started to come with the EV button in Australia. I am pretty sure the Gen2 i-Tech variant had this but I am not sure which year this started. I am considering buying a Prius and making it Plug-in with one of the Enginer kits. I am happy for anyone to warn me about pit-falls on doing this in Australia. Thanks for any help you can give.
I've got a 2005 base model and it's got the EV button. Unfortunately however in the Aussie model the EV mode (via button) only works up to 45 km/hr speedo (so probably only 43 km/hr true). It's pretty limiting. Also it only seems to work about half of the time anyway in the Australian climate due to the temperature.
From what i recall the engineer kit still has the speed restriction in ev mode up to 45kmh anything over the petrol engine will kick in. You will probably need to pulse and glide at higher speeds to get the best out of it. Wish there was an easy way to overide the speed limitation.
They all have an EV speed limit but for some reason the Aussie model has the lowest limit of just 45 km/hr (and you cant drive it at 45 km/hr because you cant control your speed that closely and it will keep "tripping" the ICE on). I find that in practice I'm pretty much limited to about 42 km/hr in EV.
To date never have run out of fuel. Not willing to try. From what i have read if you run it too low and the hybrid battery runs out of juice you need to go to Toyota so they can hook it up to some fancy charger.
Like yourself would love to put an engineer kit or something like it in mine but that speed limit would irritate alot of other drivers. Wish it was set at 65kmh but thats not going to happen. There are other kits that overcome this limit but are quite expensive.
Not sure about the gen2 but I know on the gen3 that when you have a totally full HV battery such as after going down a very long hill the car will do weird things such as running on EV (not in EV mode) right upto 45/50mph (70/80kmh). It will accelerate reasonably quickly on the electric only right upto this speed. Once the HV starts to run down the car starts to react as normal. Now once the enginer kit is installed doesn't it charge the existing HV battery completely up and then just trickle charge it as you drive? If so, then there will be many occassions when you can drive the Prius on electric only without having to use the restrictive EV option. There's a bloke from the UK who has converted his Prius with the enginer kit called flaninacupboard (don't ask! lol) who may be able to offer his experiences with a RHD enginer Prius (the RHD has some different EV speed parameters to the LHD US model I believe).
my 2007 iTech cuts off at 46kph. however, one can still transition from 45/46 and above without the engine cutting in by just lifting off the pedal and feathering it to maintain speed and accelerate slowly. easy to do this if there is enough juice as long as the road is not steep enough. i noticed that it gets more and more difficult once the SOC is below 50%.
