Best Mode for Long Idling?

1) by negative impact, if you mean will it use the battery, yes. if you mean will it harm the battery, no.

2) yes

3) it is a time/heat/humidity factor. the radio uses peanuts. we can't tell you if you will run out of juice or not. the longer you idle, the warmer more humid it is, the lower you set the a/c, the faster your battery will run down.

4) it's really not a big deal, is it?

 

but that is the 12v battery. this thread is about the hybrid battery, is it not?

you don't want to spend much time listening to prime radio in accessory mode, that will kill the 12v.

 

When is Coachella again? I need to remember to avoid I-10 those weekends.

 

A/C will eat the hybrid battery faster than anything.

 

If you enter the line with a full traction battery, I'd say after about 20 minutes with A/C in hot weather you'll have depleted the traction battery enough that the ICE will kick in. From that point onwards -- maintenance/safety/mileage-wise -- it'll be a lot like being in a non-hybrid. Except lumpier: the ICE will run to add a couple more bars to the traction battery, then stop, the battery will go down and the ICE will fire up again. As I remember, it will cycle between 2 and 4 bars -- i.e. it won't go to "empty" (which is still not actually empty), nor go all that high.

The traction battery charges and discharges all the time as you drive, so this isn't that different. The cooling air intake for the battery is in the passenger compartment -- make sure not to block it! -- so it, too, will be sucking in air-conditioned air. Of course, you won't have airflow past the car, so that's a bit stressful on the engine, etc, but no more so than a regular car under similar conditions, as far as I know.

Once the car is "Ready", I believe the traction battery powers everything and the traction battery is charged either directly by the ICE running or indirectly via regenerative braking -- or in the case of the Prime by plugging it in which happens once per travel segment. (Indirectly because the ICE either got you to higher ground and you're braking downhill, or because the ICE got you to higher speed and you're breaking slowing down.

 

Any way you can just park it and walk? Or just forget about AC, shut the system down, roll the windows down.

 

That's another advantage of a hybrid: if you choose to roll down the windows and turn it off (living with the heat), you can restart it, move it six feet, and turn it off without the ICE starting and heating itself up more. There's probably a slight battery hit in starting up and shutting down, but overall it will last you a long time doing that. If everyone else in line is shutting their car down between moves, why not?

 

don't you mean 'it will be a lot like being in a (non plug in) hybrid'?

 

On my 2013 liftback, I noticed the battery depleting rapidly while stuck in traffic with the ac on. I shut off the ac (vent fans too), turn off the daytime running lights, and roll down the windows. Don't know if ECO mode helps but I put it in that mode too.

 

...

 

[/QUOTE]
can you explain which point of mine you are responding to? i don't see the connection.

 

30 miles of ev battery will last quite awhile using a/c and not motivating the car but a few feet at a time.

 

I was thinking non-hybrid, since they would not be getting any plugin power nor regenerative power, so ultimately the ICE is powering everything, just like a non-hybrid. Except it goes in bursts of ICE usage.

I guess a non-hybrid is wasting energy simply keeping the engine running, while a hybrid is mainly concerned with raising the battery charge to a particular level. And a hybrid is working at a larger scale electrical-wise which is also more efficient. But overall they would be running an ICE (intermittently) to keep a radio, A/C etc operating, and overall using the same energy to do so.

 

gotcha. so you're saying any hybrid is really like a non hybrid in stop and go traffic.

 

Why waste your battery charge (same as keeping the engine idling on a gassers with the a/c on)? It's going to cost you $ to recharge that battery just like burning gas will.

 

i do not know, but that is what the o/p wanted. maybe didn't want the engine noise?

 

I think once you've run the traction battery down to where the ICE kicks in and if you're using heavy A/C, you're still using a fair amount of energy and it's coming out of the ICE ultimately. Of course, the ICE in a hybrid does turn off and the inefficiencies associated with keeping an engine running -- including stirring the automatic transmission fluid etc -- go away, so the hybrid is wasting less but not recovering or generating anything substantial except when the ICE is running.

I'd be interested in knowing if a non-hybrid sitting still runs at lower RPMs, etc, than a hybrid which fires up to charge the battery, along with the inefficiencies of battery charging. I have no idea. That could be a big win for the hybrid.

Certainly if it's nice weather and you can roll down the windows, the hybrid win's big time because the non-hybrid continues to run to accomplish nothing. But I'm often surprised by how quickly just sitting their in my Gen 3 while the A/C was running -- even when it's just in the 80's but in the sun -- runs down the traction battery and thus fires up the ICE.

What do you think?

(It's my understanding that a hybrid's biggest MPG advantage is that it can have a wimpy but efficient ICE without suffering from horrible low-end performance because that's where electric motors excel. Win-win. Secondarily, you can recover some of the energy that you spent getting higher or going faster. But battery charging is not super-efficient, so it's not magic. When you're sitting still but using a fair amount of energy, I'm not sure.

To answer your question, it sort of depends in what "stop and go" actually entails -- there are different dynamics depending on whether it's mostly sit with creeping, or full stops between 30 mph sprints, uphill or downhill, and so on -- what the environmental conditions are, whether you hit the backup with a full or empty traction battery, etc. The hybrid probably wins under most conditions, but sometimes I'd venture not by much.)