Parking bat state. Full charge or not?

I know nothing about how it affects mileage, but I pretty always park with half or less because I live in the very back corner of our apartment complex, so I use a fair amount of battery driving through the parking lot. I do figure that, since the engine is going to run when I start it up anyway, I might as well let it charge the battery too.

 

I'd say go ahead and use up some of that charge on the last leg of your final journey for the day. It's what I do and I have not seen any negative impact in MPGs as a result. As you said, the ICE is going to be on for while in the morning regardless, might as well get some use out of it.

 

To be honest, I think everyone's situations will be different. It's worth experimenting to find what suits you best - but if you're hitting a "full" charge during warm-up it does sound like you should be running it down in the evenings.

I actually take a different approach parking at home and parking at work because at home I have a very distant bay in a very large multi-level underground carpark and live towards the bottom of a hill. I will tend to have a higher charge on arrival and will deliberately use up as much as possible when rolling around the car park to my bay. In the mornings I now allow the ICE to start within the carpark, turn the aircon on and let it do a bit of a recharge. Because of our current season, my initial warm-up is quite short and the ICE will turn off as I stop before entering the street. I then have a fairly easy run getting out of my suburb.

At work it's totally different. Work is towards the top of a climb and also when I leave I have to pretty much get straight out onto a main road. Doing this while on a warm-up cycle causes the car to draw a LOT of power from the battery... often so much that it then leaves the ICE on for an extended period of time trying to bring it back up again and this causes a huge hit on economy. Therefore when arriving at work I've discovered it is best to have the ICE on as much as possible and park with the highest SoC I can manage.

 

In my opinion, leave the battery as full as possible. It is true that the ICE will be running in the morning no matter what but when it is cold, it is running pretty inefficiently and I personally don't want to put any load on it during that stage including charging the battery.

The first minute of drive in the mornings, if the battery is relatively full, the traction motor will do most of the work (If you are trying to stay around 15 mph or so) while the ICE will be purring happily at its constant rpm that it likes. I usually take a back street for a block or so until the ICE shuts shown.

My commute is 6 miles one way (25-35 mph zones with a ton of lights and stop signs). Including the warmup, I am getting 70-80 mpg these days while maintaining the battery charge at around 5-6 bars. Still trying to improve my charge levels. I am finding that to be the key. Sounds counter intuitive but I am trying to use the electric motor only as an aid to the ICE so the latter can run on its ideal rpms. I also use it for initial acceleration from stops up to around 12-15 mph. The rest is ICE until +5 over speed limit and glide until -3 speed limit. Seems to work well.