Is "pedal to the metal" bad for the Prius?

Don't worry. You are not opening the throttle, thank you fly by wire. Computer does it all and I have not heard of any problems from pedal mashing.

 

You get crappy MPGs if you lean on the pedal a lot. You find out how annoying Traction Control is when the tires slip even a tiny bit.

But it does zip up to speed if you work it right...

 

"Just Floor It" was the motto for the Classic Prius.

Since it was slower and people had been taught for decades to control the engine RPM manually based on pedal position, they really had trouble remembering that the hybrid system was different. So we kept repeating that advice.

It worked well too. Mashing the pedal down just sends a request for "maximum" acceleration. The computer actually controls how that is accomplished... which automatically prevents anything bad from happening.

 

i floor it regularly. no problems.

 

"Is "pedal to the metal" bad for the Prius?"

I sure hope not :lol:

Most days it happens at least once when I'm entering the HOV lane.

 

The biggest problem I've come across when flooring it in my '06, is when doing it from either a dead stop or a slow roll. A couple times I have lost all power for a split second. Its weird to have that happen on dry pavement and good weather conditions, but I'm guessing the tires must have barely started spinning and the TC kicked in. This may not really be a "harmful" thing to the car itself except for the possibility of being hit because of the power loss. Anyone else experience this on dry pavement? (no gravel)

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(crimsonbaboon @ Apr 5 2006, 06:02 PM) [snapback]235526[/snapback]</div>

Yep. Never when accelerating in a completely straight line, but the other day it happend on dry pavement when entering the HOV lane. I wasn't turning sharply at all and was probably rolling at about 20mpg, but one of the tires must have slipped on a pebble or something. It was very disconcerting as a Ford Econline was coming down the lane, but once power was reapplied I got going again right quick.

 

The highest the ICE will rev is 5,000 RPM. I say that's pretty safe. If it rev to 7k RPM like the Echo engine, the ICE would make close to 100 hp.

Dennis

 

I'm curious, is it possible to "peel out" or make the tires screech in a prius? If the traction control kicks in and drops the power at the slightest spin wouldn't that make burnouts impossible?

 

So far I've been unable to peel out or make the tires screech in my Prius. I used to do so every other week or so in my Saturn, usually when making a right hand turn from a stop, and then flooring it. In the Prius, the traction control I think it is (or is it the VSC?) cuts power to the wheels for a second while making the same exact turns, not allowing for spinning the wheels or screeching the tires. The car was designed to protect itself from potential damage in doing tire spins on wet or dry pavement. It can be a bit of an annoyance, especially when I'm trying to floor it ahead of traffic or into the flow of traffic from a dead stop, but I'd rather it do that than allow me to do what I wanted it to and potentially do damage to itself.

 

When you take off from a dead stop, you're actually using your electric motor about 90%. The current is limited to the electric to prevent wheelspin. Some enterprising hacker could probably alter the current limiting code and make a Prius that would lay rubber for 200 yards. That electric motor is POWERFUL. It wouldn't be very good for battery lifetime, tho!

 

That's pretty interesting. I'm just glad the car was designed to do that and its not a mechanical problem like I thought when it first happened.

 

I almost always accelarate at full throttle. Engineers are overly conservative these days. Even if you ran it at full throttle up until the speed limiter cut in, you would cause no harm. Just go for it. Besides, ICE's are most efficient at full throttle.

 

That's good information to know. I guess I still have to take it easy though since I'm still in the break-in period. Although hopefully that will only be for another week or two. Not that I'm planning to track it or anything.

 

What makes hybris work so well is that the electric motor has ALL of it's tourque at zero speed. That's the reason we can do 0 to 60 in 10.4. It's amazing how many people thinki the care is "pokey", but I've amazed more than a few people accelerating up the I-5 onramp near work. They couldn't keep up due to the hill and starting from ~5MPH. Also, we don't have any time lost shifting because of the CVT.

On concrete roads in traffic (like Seattle), it is especially easy to break the tires loose (for 0.1 seconds). It blinks the little traction light, and you just keep going. This is also a function of the tires, (I still have the OEMs), but it's mostly the incredible torque available at all speed.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(jmccord @ Apr 5 2006, 02:42 PM) [snapback]235417[/snapback]</div>

I concure with (almost) all comments, and would like to add couple more...

Since the gas quality has some minor or more affect also on the Atkinson Cycle ICE, it is a very good Idea to let it go for some resonalbe amount of time (1-5 miles) at near max RPM, it helps burn out some of the carbon build up when using gasolines of lesser Quality (80% of the fuel sold in the USA). The carbon build up is also indicate by "pinging" of the ICE under high load conditions.

One comment I do disagree with is: that the ICE is max efficient at "max" RPM - the "eta" line of the Prius ICE (atkinson cycle) is almost flat, with almost no marginal gain at the later 1000 RPMs of the full range. The 5000 RPMs max is only there to accomadate the "B" mode when additional "mass" is needed to ofset Kenetic energy., with out that the ICE could very well TOPOUT at 3500 RPM, but this would be bad to keep the MG1 & MG2 in check when it goes down hill, or when the MGs need to charge a low battery and you still want to go up the hill to your drive way.

Wheel Slip is normal under 0-10 MPH since the TRAC continously monitors the output of the MG, and that is signaled by a minor "difference" in rotation of the left and right wheel, and causes the VSC to assume a dangerous condition - tracktion loss.

Also one more trick is if you want some "good boost" at the offramp, just charge your battery up to 7+ bars (green, applying brakes more suddle) and you can take atvantage of the full 500V of power from the Hybrid system.

I did this one day (by accident) not knowing that there would be such a drastic / noticable difference, and this thing (Prius) took off like I had not seen before. Well it makes a big difference what STOC the battery is in.

Any way guys, you are great, and keep having the "prius" kind of fun,

Ralph

 

Same issue come up on the "Talk about EV" thread. I was saying that many of my friends think my Prius is slow. So I did a little research on their cars' spec. The Prius MGs produce 295 ft-lb of torque. Compairing to my friends' cars (they don't have the 06 model and not V6), 06 Civic Si: 139 ft-lb, 06 Altima V6: 251 ft-lb, 06 Maxima V6: 255 ft-lb, 06 Camry XLE V6: 197 ft-lb, 06 Corolla S: 122 ft-lb.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(jmccord @ Apr 6 2006, 01:30 AM) [snapback]235738[/snapback]</div>

Same here! Damn traction control...