Hey everyone, your advice is appreciated! I drive 5-10 minutes to work daily in the morning on my way to work. There is about a mile long stretch between the entrance to my work and the actual parking lot. The time of day I drive in, typically traffic will be backed up to the entrance of the gate or even further. My question is, by this point the prius is fully warmed up. While driving in this stop-and-go traffic from the gate to the parking lot, can I put the car in "EV" mode (pressing the EV button)? The reason I ask is because sometimes traffic will accelerate quickly up to 15-25mph then shoot back down to a stand-still; in eco mode if I accelerate to keep up with the pace of traffic, the gasoline engine kicks on, and typically when I slow back down sometimes it won't go back into "full EV" mode, which bothers me, but if I hadn't accelerated so hard, it would have stayed in EV mode. I would like to stay with the flow of traffic as much as possible, so would it hurt the car if I flipped it to "EV Mode" and drove it that way for the mile stretch to the parking lot; and my bigger concern is -- if I do this, if the battery drains too low, will the prius automatically kick itself out of EV mode that I put it in by pressing the button so I don't have to worry about battery damage?? Thanks for your help!
Yes, the Prius will take care of itself but are you using EV under the right circumstance if your battery is low by the time you park?
The car will take care of itself. It will kick on the Ice to recharge the HV battery when it is needed. Once you hit 25 in ev mode it will kick on the ICE also. Also you will most likely loose overall ave mpg doing what your saying cause when you go to restart your car it will be burning some gas to recharge the HV battery from your ev mode driving. But you will case no harm to anything.
Thanks guys! Any suggestions on how I should drive to maximize efficiency? You're correct too, the battery is dead when I go to turn it on and head home, and the ICE ends up recharging it.
Can you time the stop-and-go traffic into mini-pulse & glide cycles most of the time, without angering the other drivers in line? This generally means leaving longer gaps when not going through the choke points, which in some cultures is considerable very unsociable, but works in others. But don't dally through the choke points that actually control the throughput.
