Best way to traverse a mountain in a Prius?

Drive the car as you normally would. Not slow, not fast. If the speed limit is slow, then go as fast as you can while staying in the EV range of the meter.

I always "freak out" when going down a hill on a full battery. "I'm not using my battery! All the energy is going to waste!"

 

I maybe am not a great person to answer being that I am in Florida but I noticed the same thing after driving my car during a long stretch of open road that the battery is fully charged so what I do is force the car to go into battery by controlling the throttle and using the eco meter and use some of the battery a good mile back before hitting the brakes to stop

 

What matters is the mpg (energy usage) you get. Powering up unnecessarily will use a lot more gas than cruising up at the speed limit, and might not use the battery as much as you think. You will need to try it out.

 

Going up a mountain it's probably not possible to "PULSE'N'GLIDE" unless there's nobody behind you, and only in the odd place where it might level out. But like robsnyder20 mentioned about Open Road driving, that's where it is possible to play the PULSE'N'GLIDE game - needs patience and not much traffic around.

Search for Pulse and Glide in the PriusChat search. It's also mentioned in the Owner's Manual but not in much detail..

 

My motto:

Don't analyze it... Just drive it.

That eliminates the confusion and frustration on my part. I don't drive mountains, but I know the Toyota engineers are much smarter than me, so I just let the car do what it's going to do. I don't even notice the "battery bars" anymore. I don't care if the car is operating in EV, or the gas engine is on... or both. It's gets me where I need to go, with 62 mpg. Can't complain about that.

 

I would not worry about going up, but I would be ready to use B mode going down to save the friction brakes...

 

Just came back from 2000+ mile road trip. Mostly in the mountains. Up to 3000km. Combined mileage 53. I noticed a few things about mountain driving on Gen 4. First, on winding mountain roads with no cars around it is better to use the regular cruise control (I was wondering why was it there?!). Because of sometimes erratic behavior of DRCC probably due to reflection from the rocks. And second, I noticed that if I use DRCC going down the hill, say fix it on 65 mph, the car engages B for me to stay within this limit, which I don't recall my Gen. 2 was doing. This is cool. Sometimes the slope is so steep that B does not help, and the car keeps accelerating (meaning the brakes are not applied automatically), but still, it is a progress.

 

Toyota has missed a trick here. I suggested it in a post some time ago. If the Sat Nav data had topography info included so that the car knew about road gradients, when using the sat nav so the car knows where you are going thw nav could inform the State of charge and regen systems so that they could make better use of the battery to store energy when going down hill by emptying it more on the way up.
The Prime could of course do this far more than the Lift back using its big battery, assuming it was not already charged to max.
I thought that the Prime's PED system might be a version of this but it seems not. I.'ve been told that just advised the driver how to drive.
Shame, cos working this way could make a decent improvement in efficiency on mountainous routes.

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

Anyway to avoid this mountain? probably not, but just curious.

 

I agree with this.
Toyota has designed a lot of hardware and software to protect your battery and promote efficiency. Often I think people overthink what they "think" they need to do to make it "better".

My point of view is that if you reach the top of a hill with your battery on the upper 1/2 of being charged...Bravo to Toyota for finding a way to preserve and add to that energy while going uphill.

 

Still, hauling a ton or two of steel on wheels up and over a mountain is tough work, there's no free lunch. And doing it daily will accelerate the car's aging. If there's a longer route that skirts the mountain I'd go with that if at all possible.

 

Why go over or skirt..... when you can go through!

Yee Haw!

I'm all for blasting a hole through the mountain. But getting the proper permits would be difficult.

 

The real reason, is because I'm "technology-challenged." That's why I'm such a big believer in personal simplicity. Keeping things as simple as possible in my life. My Prius is a great car, and as The Electric Me said, I don't want to try and "overthink it." I'm way better off, just letting that hybrid car do it's thing.

I get in it. I push the start button. I put it in drive. And off I go… I know it sounds nuts, but I no longer even look at all the gauges and displays. Only the gas gauge. That's about it.

 

Fwiw, just get on with it! It's much easier to beg for forgiveness afterwards than beg for permission first!

 

I would have to question the added value. The firmware won't let the battery get below 2 bars. Even if you start with a full battery, the energy involved is the equivalent of about 1/64 of a gallon of gasoline. Now a PIP or Prime might be a different story.

 

When descending, the brakes simply store energy, they don't actually touch the brake pads to the rotors, well, at 20mph and below they do, when ascending, obviously, the car is using the traction battery, and charging it, just pick a speed, if you try to pulse and glide going up hil???