Prius Battery Replacement (GenII) Like you've never seen - NEW Cylindrical Cells

All sold out again. The good news is the freight truck for this months shipment is due to arrive tomorrow morning so hopefully no problems. But I have been trying to keep some holdover from month to month just in case. Guess I need to up the order size yet again.

 

It's like getting a haircut and complaining that your knee hurts. Your knee probably hurts but it has nothing to do with the haircut. Just bad timing. It's not possible for a battery to do what is described. Everyone who has replaced a battery knows what happens when the battery "goes bad". Mileage drops, and eventually you get sluggish response. Before that it just charges and discharges more and more quickly. That's it. The Prius is made to work with minimal battery. If other things are happening, it's not the battery's fault. But on a 15 year old car, it may be something else.

 

Supercaps have terrible memory problems and are very expensive.

 

Sure... On what?

We have lots in stock and ready to ship.

 

Oh yes... One of the reasons I bought the car way back then.

This was an extremely common technique a decade ago. The contactor style kits that just output a boosted voltage from the LiFePO4 pack into the NiMH stock pack which made the Prius just think the battery was at a high SoC all the time. And it worked great. For even better performance you tricked the car to go into OOG mode (Out of Gas) and then you'd get max power and no engine even if you stomped the pedal. This was all new and exciting pre-2010. I bought the Prius with the intention of retrofitting it into a PHEV. I worked quite a bit on decoding the CANBus in the Prius and getting the car into and out of OOG mode at the flick of a button. Did some tests with a mule pack and some custom hardware it all worked awesome. Then Nissan came out with the Leaf. In CO, for $16k you get a brand new 24KWh actual electric vehicle. You can't compete with that in your garage. So I bought a Leaf.

The Prius is a great HEV. It's a terrible PHEV and even worse forced BEV that just carries around an extra thousand pound engine around for no reason. Back when there didn't exist any good PHEVs and only Tesla BEVs, the Prius was a good test mule and a good experimentation setup. You were one of the exerimentors. But the fact remains that using the Prius as a PHEV today is akin to the $800 rust bucket with a $10k sound system from the 1990's. You're going to take a $2k vehicle and put $10k of batteries in it to get a hacked Frankenstein style vehicle with no warranty and lots of quirks that works half as well as the commercial version you can just buy from Nissan for close to the same price. Or now, even just the PiP/Prime. There will always be someone to do it, but it is not worth it in 2019. It wasn't worth it since about 2012.

Sorry to burst your bubble.

 

Lol, not really. But I have done. I know some people who do.

Some people know, I travel quite a bit. It is more rare than normal for me to actually be at my house Friday through Sunday. And during the week, if I am not travelling for other reasons I work very strange hours for all my various businesses.

 

The OOG mode doesn't limit anything itself. Because you're in D, the engine can still spin properly, there's just no fuel. So there's no over-revving problem you get when you just try to force the engine off or coast from low speed EV to higher speed which can damage the MGs and engine.

The physical limit should be about 62mph in the Gen-2 Prius before you start revving over 10k on the MG which can cause damage. Note this was changed from Gen-1 to Gen-2 but the software wasn't, so you have to force it. The car will allow faster, and I think there are YouTube videos in the 70mph range. But it also takes a decade to get up to that speed, there just isn't enough power. You're trying to move a few thousand pound gigantic vehicle with 1950's motorcycle engine power levels.