I noticed on a long trip this weekend that my battery was staying one bar from fully charged about 1/3 of the 400 miles? Is this normal?
I was going up hill quite a bit. So on a flat surface and it's still doing this, should this be a concern?
It should not deplete to 1 bar on flat surface. If you climb a long hill and you get to 1 bar, it would take a little time to recover from that 1 bar on flat surface. If you are not climbing any hills and you get to 1 bar, that would not be normal.
Dumb question here. So the Prius likes to keep the charge in the middle. Is 1 bar from a full charge not a concern, but 1 bar from being dead a bad thing to see?
yes the computers in the car will keep the charge somewhat in the middle in regular driving. Even at 1 bar, the battery is still about 40% charged, it's not close to dead at that point.
The Gen II wants to keep the car state of charge at 67% while hiway driving. This allows for charging when going downhill so regen is not wasted. 67% is the top blue bar.
OP, you're talking about one bar from the top, or 7 bars, right? 1/3 of the time? It's probably not a concern, as long as the level isn't changing rapidly. 1 bar at the bottom is sometimes seen when crawling in slow traffic, when stopped a long time or after doing some significant ascending. For flat, normal driving, 1 bar isn't very common, but it's possible, for an occasional, short period.
You'll see both and should not be concerned. When ascending a long hill at speed, the traction battery SOC easily could drop to one bar. And that does not constitute being dead since as pointed out, one bar corresponds to 40% SOC. If you have the air conditioner compressor working hard in high summer temps, the battery SOC could decline to one bar before the gasoline engine will turn on to bring the SOC back up. When descending a long hill at speed, you could easily see 7 or 8 green bars on the SOC gauge. And if the battery charge gets too high you'll hear the gasoline engine rev up as MG1 works to spin the engine in order to use up excess battery charge.
Yes, I was 1 bar from the top for about an hour after doing some up hills and down hills. I thing I averaged 48.1 on 420 miles.
I guess my overall question is, "can you tell the health of your traction battery from the charing gauge on your display screen"? If someone knows of a thread, or write up that explains this could you attach it? I never could find one.
The main way you can tell that the traction battery is having a problem using the SOC gauge is when you see very rapid changes, in a matter of minutes, from 8 bars to 1 bar or the reverse. That provides a slight amount of advance warning that the battery is about to die, and this will be confirmed some time later when you see the hybrid vehicle or traction battery warning icon appear in the upper left corner of the MFD along with various warning lights in the dashboard accompanying the red triangle of death.
