Hey guys. Newbie here just purchased a 2018 Prius prime! Super excited for the savings and reliability. Coming from years of street bikes and modified cars. It's nice to daily something that I can trust for once. Never thought I'd be in a Prius but hey! Really love the car. Just curious as to what the best option for highway driving is? 401 East to West. HV mode, EV auto or just leave it in EV mode?
Congrats!! Sounds like it would be EV Auto for you. The engine doesn't come on unless you really press it down but delivers a bump in pickup. Depends on how long your highway part is. If it's really long stick with HV. Great car to experiment with and you'll figure it out as it responds quite well.
Thanks for the reply! Super excited!! Read a bunch of posts on here and most people seem to say just leave it on normal mode and EV auto until the Hybrid engine kicks in and recharges the battery once it's dead! And the car will just do it's thing. I'll tinker around and see what's best
Congrats ......Prius Prime is a fascinating and addictive car,....when I travel on a highway for more than a few km, I switch the car to HV , that way the traction battery keeps it's charge . ...just drive it and enjoy. BTW pushing and holding the HV/EV button for a few seconds , initiates the Charge mode up to 80 SOC.if you need a quick charge on the road
Congrats! She's 5-years old so will need a little maintenance to avoid any issues if they haven't been done. (Transmission and engine/traction battery coolant changes.) Any whether normal, hybrid, or prime, oil changes every 6-months or 5,000 miles. (We go with 3,000 for our non-Toyota cars)
What do you mean by charging? Hold it down as I'm driving and it will charge the EV battery? Will I lose mpg by charging it that way? I got it from a Toyota dealership and it went through a 150 point inspection, I'm wondering if they changed the fluids if not I'll totally have to look into it. Also can you or anyone else here reading this give me some advice/answer a question? I had the car charging on a 15amp 120v plug for about 5 hours and only got 22% charge on the EV battery. I'm going to test it tomorrow during the day on the 60a 240v charger at work. I don't have any charge schedule set up, just plugged it in and when I came back the green light was off and only 20 percent!
Yes. The engine will be “forced” to charge the battery. Great if you need a quick top up to for inner city EV driving. Yes your mpg will suffer.
Ahhh okay, thank you for the reply. Im sure I'll find a fitting time to use this mode . Good to know I have it
Just a simple question, did you read the owner' manual concerning how to charge the car , and verified the charging parameters.Are the settings at 8 amps or 12 amps ...this will influence the time it takes to charge the traction battery on 120Vac or 240Vac. usually for a 12 amp setting at 120 Vac it should take approx 5H 1/2 to fully charge and at 240V it should take half ot that time ruffly 2h1/4 to fully charge the traction battery. you can dowload the manual from toyota it is a PDF document for your model and your year . N.B. as I see it , your question about the Charge mode reveals that you overlooked the user manual but I think you where so excited with your new car, that you did not have time to take a look
Uses for "charge mode" are very limited. Most people never use it. Charging the battery with the gasoline engine is inherently inefficient due to the multiple conversion losses. These are laws of physics, not engineering issues. One of the few uses for it that can sometimes make sense is to generate some charge for use in stop-and-go city driving at the end of a long trip during which the battery has been drained, but even that can be tricky to sort out.
yes indeed , but if you need a quick charge and you want to burn some old gas left in your tank before it goes stale , charge mode is an interresting option
Yes I was super excited and was in GO GO mode I gapped big time. But after a few weeks of ownership I figured it all out and I'm finally now able to enjoy the car without a billion things running through my mind lol!!! I'm able to get from work and home on full electric, my idea with the charge mode is one day a week, I won't charge at home or work and just refill the battery through this method. As long as I can get through a tank in two months I think I should be fine lol!
Thanks for this. I tried to digest the Quick Start Guide, and the manual yesterday, but today when taking delivery with the car at SOC: ——-% (700 miles from home to get it!) I couldn’t remember this. On the long drive home in HV mode the deceleration and regenerative braking were clearly adding some but it never got above the little division in the battery meter.
I'm with CharlesH in Post #11. Keep the car in EV mode and forget it. It'll take care of itself. That said, I have one hilly route that is more than battery range where EVAuto does run the gasoline engine up those hills and results in a slightly lower gas consumption for the full route. I've never found a use for recharging the battery from the engine nor switching to HV mode. We continue to disagree. All my vehicles get the oil changed as spec'ed in the owner's manual, and they've run fine for as long as 202,000 miles (Volvo turbo, 5k oil drain interval) without engine repairs and the camshaft gallery still visually clean. My Prime gets the oil changed at 10k, as specified, and that is NOT engine miles; we don't know the engine miles, but they aren't many. My Mazda turbo gets its oil changed as specified at 7,500, and I have every confidence that there will be no engine wear or sludge problems.
You've probably figured this out by now, but what you describe is completely normal. It usually only goes above the line with charging or running in charge mode. Maybe on a long downhill run...
In my experience EV Auto is worse than useless. It will just stay on EV mode till the battery runs down and then switch to HV mode. Basically zero difference from just using EV mode. I've tested it multiple times and it's always the same. Super annoyingly the car will ALWAYS revert to EV mode on restart. Even if you are just stopping at a rest area on the highway. Get back in and forget to hit the HV button and the battery just runs down to HV mode. This has burned me multiple times.
