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My plug in battery when from 9.5 miles to 13 miles fully charged?!!!

Discussion in 'Gen 1 Prius Plug-in 2012-2015' started by J wil, Aug 21, 2022.

  1. J wil

    J wil Junior Member

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    2012 Prius Plug-in
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    Plug-in Advanced
    2012 Toyota’s PIP with 163,000 miles on it… My ex-wife drove this car for 4 years and never plugged it in. When she asked me to buy it… I said yes. Upon taking the car back over I found that it only charged to 9.5 miles… For the last year that is about what I got with it constantly plugging it in. But if you saw my battery problem this last week… I posted it in the regular forum.
    Heres what happened…
    I changed the spark plugs…
    Upon changing the spark plugs for some reason my house battery 12 V decided to finally die. I changed the 12 V battery. Drove to my shop and plugged the car in. Got in the car and had a full 13.3 miles of electric power! What would trigger this? How would simply changing the spark plugs and the battery re-invigorate the plug in battery? Anyway. Im very happy. I thought that 9.5 miles per charge was just regular degradation of the battery being that it is 10 years old. What do you think?
     
    #1 J wil, Aug 21, 2022
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  2. drash

    drash Senior Member

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    Wasn't the the spark plugs.

    What happened when you swapped out the 12V battery is you reset what the computer had been storing for the last 163K miles. It didn't have real plug-in data, so it did the next best thing, guessed from the way the previous driver drove the car and adjusted the range the previous driver may gotten when they drove the car if they used the battery. Your one year of usage merely dented what the previous driver had accumulated. Now you have a new set of data with just you driving. You have practically a brand new battery.
     
    #2 drash, Aug 21, 2022
    Last edited: Aug 21, 2022
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  3. willyag

    willyag Junior Member

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    When I changed my battery I also got a new reading of 12 miles when fully charged. Since then the high reading has been slowly going down to the 7.5 miles I had previously. Hopefully your high reading stays high but in actuality, the battery is what it is and eventually the high reading will reflect that.
     
    #3 willyag, Aug 22, 2022
  4. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    that's the factory default setting that all pips came with. it loses all memory when you disconnect the 12v, so you'll be adding new history as you charge and drive.
    keep in mind, the battery icon indicated miles are not what you can actually drive. just a calculation of past dring based on the amount of charge in the battery.
     
    #4 bisco, Aug 22, 2022
  5. nicoj36

    nicoj36 Active Member

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    Now im tempted to reset my pip by disconnecting the battery
     
    #5 nicoj36, Aug 24, 2022
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  6. QuantumFireball

    QuantumFireball Active Member

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    It'll just go down to the previous figures within a week or two.
     
    #6 QuantumFireball, Sep 5, 2022
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  7. nicoj36

    nicoj36 Active Member

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    I usually get 9.5 miles from a full-charge. After resetting the PIP by disconnecting the battery, it went up to 14.5 miles full charge. But it gradually went down to 11.9 miles and it stayed there ever since :)
     
    #7 nicoj36, Sep 5, 2022
  8. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    mine did something new this year. it usually peaks in the nice spring weather when i'm not using any hvac. but this year, through a very hot and humid summer, it peaked a couple weeks ago at 14.3, and has slowly dropped to 13.9 since then,
     
    #8 bisco, Sep 5, 2022
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  9. jerrymildred

    jerrymildred Senior Member

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    The estimated range is simply that: an estimate. It can be off by a LOT. What matters is how far you can actually go in EV and the estimate won't have any impact on the actual range. That's why it's called a Guess-O-Meter (GOM).
     
    #9 jerrymildred, Sep 5, 2022
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  10. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    mine is almost spot on, because all my driving is the same or similar
     
    #10 bisco, Sep 5, 2022
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