I always knew when I was gliding in my Gen II. I never know with my PHEV. And about the best I've been able to come up with is that if my ScanGauge is showing 9999MPG, and the display is showing no charge/no power, then I must be gliding. But that coasting feeling that came with the GenII coast/glide really isn't there with the PHEV. It's like the car is always feels like it's dragging when I'm not accelerating. I can't find the sweet spot with the pedal that always was so EASY to find to glide the older Prius. Has anyone else noticed this, OR, is there a different way to think about glides in a PHEV?
Basically glide doesn't exist in a Gen 3 Prius or PHV, as you knew it in your Gen2 car. The closest you can come to it in a PHV/Gen3 is having the littlest bit of HSI Eco band lit just above the regen range. It's basically stealth an warp stealth in the gen 2. It's also min Ev in Ev mode. There is a good YouTube video called Pulse and Glide in the Gen 3 Prius that covers much of this. These new pips are heavier and seem to have much more rolling resistance than the previous Generation
If you have PHEV why not use a little more battery power to extend glide, I know I know when you run out of SOC plug-in Prius is like a normal Prius, but if you know you will not make it in EV mode why not switch to HV mode a litle early and do longer glides with a little (left side bar of HSI) help from the battery? This will ensure the ICE is running in most efficent range, or not?
Hmm... I think I would rely on the reading on the Scangauge. At least this is what I see with my Prius C; I assume / believe I am gliding when I see 9999 MPG (or 229 MPG, don't know why it doesn't go higher than this sometime) and about 0-10 AMP drawn from battery. Am I really doing gliding?? I'm not 100% sure, but these show me I'm not consuming much gas and energy.
The PIP does show a lot more drag than my previous PRIUS so I have found if I have enough battery and I am on a downward slope that would normally require energy to keep from slowing down, I shift the car in N. When the car in in N, there is very little drag. Also shifting back into D works without any effort. This seems to work at any speed. I used to do this with my previus PRIUS and it works great with the PIP too.
If you really want to glide, shift to N. but the beauty of the PiP is that you can "warp stealth" -- run in EV mode -- almost forever. That's why the HSI display is so useful. If you drive slowly in HV mode and stay left of center on the HSI, you have an enormous amount of EV range. Maybe I'll get up early on Saturday and test it out, I bet I can get 30 EV miles that way if I try hard enough. But what I did was use it in traffic on my 80 mile commute, and I got 75 MPG on a full tank that way.
Can't speak for other states, but it is a violation of the California vehicle code for the car to be coasting while in Neutral. V C Section 21710 Coasting Prohibited. Some safety concern about control of the car, I think.
Then I was breaking the law today. I inadvertently pushed the Park button while driving on the freeway. I think I probably intended to push the PWR button, but whatever. The beeping started, the Triangle of Death appeared, and I knew what happened, but I didn't realize that the transmission had shifted into N. So there was a few seconds of "What's going on?" before I saw the message. A quick shift into D solved the problem. But it did answer a question I'd always had about what would happen if you pushed P while the car was in motion. Now I know. And it's illegal to boot? Who knew!?!?!
I did the same thing one time and thought that I had to put it in 'P' to get to 'D' so I had to guide my car to the side and stop (which seemed dangerous). I'm glad to learn I don't need to do that next time
I can think of a few notable down grades in the state, but "the Grapevine" and large trucks is the first to come to mind. LOL
