Prime compared to standard Prius

Once you deplete the battery down to regular hybrid mode a certain capacity is still reserved for hybrid mode. It becomes a normal Hybrid Prius at that point just like your 2016. It can theoretically refill itself from regenerative braking, but that will only get you maybe 3% charge. Perhaps a long descent down a mountain could charge more but you'll rarely see this.

The only way to fully charge to 100% is to plug in. You can partially recharge to 80% using charge mode, to run the engine and charge the battery, but it's not efficient to burn gas just to create electricity.

 

Yes you charge up the EV part of the battery. The hybrid part of the battery is always available. You can use either the charge cable (cheapest) that comes with car or gas (charge mode) to charge it back up.


Unsupervised!

 

There is only one battery. a portion is reserved for Electric only mode the rest for Hybrid mode.
Of the useable battery it’s about 80% Electric and 20% Hybrid.
By default once the Electric portion is exhausted it doesn’t get recharged except by things like regenerative braking and downhill coasting. BUT there is a third mode called Charge Mode where the engine will recharge the electric mode portion of the battery to 80%. There is no button dedicated to Charge Mode but rather you press and hold the EV/HV button for a few seconds to switch to charge mode. As there is no free lunch Charge Mode will use fuel and decrease fuel efficiency.

 

Those are all good answers above. When the EV part of the battery is depleted, it runs exactly like your 2016 EXCEPT that in the regular hybrid you can push the EV button and drive in EV for a short distance. When you use up the EV range in the Prime and it automatically goes to HV, there is no EV available at all until you get some EV range by plugging in, going down a LONG hill, or using charge mode to burn extra gas making electricity. That's sometimes a little annoying, but the rest of the car has so many advantages that it's hard for me to complain. The car has one traction battery. It's about 8.8 kWh in size. Toyota lets us use most of that total. Most of what we can use is available for EV driving, but you can run in HV at any state of charge if you choose to.

 

Best to use EV Auto mode in that situation. If you know your trip will be outside EV range, hit the EV Auto button when you start your trip. It will use both electric and engine efficiently and keep the battery from depleting quickly. If you start in HV mode it will preserve the EV range and never use it up.

 

use the ev on side roads and hv at higher speeds

 

The speed limit on the interstates here is usually 70 mph with the need to go up to 75 mph or more to keep up with traffic at times. While you can use EV at 70, it uses the available charge up quickly. I have also had a delay a couple of times when using EV on interstate for the engine to kick one when I needed to accelerate quickly from these higher speeds.

So, when I leave my house, I let it default to EV as I drive through the neighborhood and get to the highway. I usually switch to HV as I hit the interstate. Then switch back to EV when I exit the interstate.

If I will only be driving for a short distance on a lower speed interstate <55 mph, I might leave in EV or use EV auto for the whole trip.

The best part of the Prime is going down the hill near my house and gaining up to 6 miles of charge from the regenerative braking.

 

This is also my preference.

 

Agreed. The few times I used EV Auto it just burned through the EV and then reverted to HV mode. I would have liked it to use HV when the ICE would have bee most efficient but it didn’t. Disappointed.

 

My experience the same. It just ran EV until zero and went to HV. How's that different than the standard EV mode at startup?

 

Last trip I went on I specifically set it to HV mode for freeway driving saving the battery for city driving. Then we stopped at a rest area and I forgot to hit HV again when starting out. Drained the battery and it was HV for the remainder of the trip. It drove fine but it's another thing I really don't like about the Prime. The insistence on starting out a certain way is annoying. The HVAC works the same way. Every time I get in the car it has switched back to ECO. GRRRR!

 

I think there maybe quantifiable difference between regular Prins and Prime. Driving 200+ mile round trip in central valley of CA, a relatively flat landscape, my wife regularly gets 85+ MPG with only one change at home. When you look at percentage of EV, it is often more than 50% despite running out of E V range in the first 30-32 miles of the trip.

I drove 230 miles to Bear Vallery ski resort today averaging 69 MPG, with well over 7.2k elevation differences, without trying to hypermile.

There must be more to having larger traction battery, IMHO.

In my experience, Prime attains better MPG figures when I try to minimize number of warm up cycles than had I micromanaged HV/EV.

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

The Prime LOVES mountains.

 

Same here.

I manually switch between EV mode (side roads, city driving) and HV mode (highway). Its as simple as pushing a button under the infotainment system in the middle console.

 

The difference there is the terrain. Mountain climbs is worse for fuel economy than relatively flat. The small "hills" I travel every day dropped my 2005 instant MPG to around 25mpg.

The EV percentage readout on the Prime is the same as on the Prius; just showing miles driven without the engine on. Which is useless data.

 

Yep, as I’ve noted the difference between my wife’s NXh and my Prime without EV.

Don’t get me wrong I enjoy driving the NXh but it has driven exactly the same distance in EV as both my Gen 2 and PiP (without EV) on the exact same stretch of road - 40mph zone, flat, 2 miles. All 3 went about 3/4 mile before switching to HV. The Prime without EV went the entire 2 miles and then some before the engine came back on. I was shocked, because the Prime probably has between 1.2 to 1.6kWh HV reserve (calculated from your reports - 14 to 18%) which is the same as the NiMH Prius (1.3kWh). But the Prime has no top end so in HV mode it doesn’t get cut off at 85% like the regular Prius.

I’d always wonder what it would be like if Toyota had doubled the hybrid battery and stuck it under the floor.


iPad ? Pro

 

It's amazing how far the Prime goes on EV when running in HV. I'd love to be able to directly compare it to a regular Gen 4.