2022 Prime LE Rear View Mirror / ICE starting when battery depleted.

I wouldn’t worry about running out of electric miles on the highway - *surely* Toyota knew this would occur and occur often for commuters so there has to be some kind of engineering solution / methods to deal with & handle it. Wouldn’t be much of a vehicle you’d want if it did damage going from electric miles to ICE miles which happens at varying speeds & RPM for all of us when we drive longer than the charge..

 

Right, I've never been a fan of using EV till it's used up and having the ICE fire up with --- EV miles. It shouldn't hurt the car, but in the scenario above I'd start the ICE at a slower speed and run it through it's warm-up cycle before getting on the Hwy. Plus you get easy heat (after warm-up cycle) that way without taking it from the heat pump and your EV range. When you're on the Hwy and think you have enough EV range to finish the commute, turn off the heat and switch back into EV mode. You'll probably have to try a few different ways to see if the car will go back into EV on the Hwy, sometime it will and other times it wouldn't. Than you can compare your gauge scores for your commute, if that stuff in important to you.
Or switch on EV before you get on the Hwy section of the commute. Again, there's a learning curve for going from HV to EV in cold weather, so don't get frustrated if you can't figure out how to do it the first few times.

 

Not sure about PRIME - but with PRIUS, you can kick the ICE to life when you start by giving a jab on the accelerator. See if that works - and then it'll run for a minute or 2 to warm up the ICE then go back to sleep, nice and snug and warm.

MIRROR - the standard mirror is auto-dim, and if you were to cover it up with another larger one, I suppose it would still dip and undip - just you wouldn't see it. I've never had a problem with it - it fills the entire back window fine for me. But that might depend on the seating position.

 

Welcome to PC.

No it doesn't. The electric motors do most of the work till the ICE is warmed up. If you don't have the split screen display enabled so you can see the instantaneous mpg gauge, do that and you'll see that when the ICE starts, you're getting about 90-100 mpg at 65 mph. Once it's warmed up, you'll see low mpg as it pays back the battery energy it borrowed during warmup. If not for this, the junkyards would be full of Prius Primes. Instead, they are just about the most dependable cars ever made.

Unlike the primitive cars most people drive, a hybrid's engine speed is not completely tied to wheel speed.