Battery capacity drop after 5 years

I’m not very sophisticated with measuring my battery’s parameters but my vehicle with similar use levels to yours last week gave me 31 miles. It was warm, but not warm enough to turn on the AC. This seemed similar to what it was when I purchased the car over 4 years ago.

 

11% seems about right

 

I’m definitely interested in this issue. No clear evidence yet that the estimated full-charge EV mileage is reduced in my 2 year old, low mileage PP.

Are there others out there who can report on their experience with older, higher-mileage PP’s?

Cheers.

 

My 148k km (92k miles) Prime shows a range of 42 km (26 miles) but I hardly drain it all while staying in EV (I either do short EV drives or long ones requiring the engine and highway driving). The other day though I almost drained it all while doing city driving (max 70 km/h). When I got back home, I was at that 42 km and still had 15% left in the battery, giving me an extrapolated range of 48 km (30 miles). Previous owner had a consumption of 2.6 L/100 km (90 mpg) for the car's first 136k km (85k miles) while I averaged a consumption of 1.8 L/100 km (130 mpg) for the 12k km (7.5k miles) I added to it.

 

If it helps, I still have my 2018 in use and at over 80,000 Kms, I continue to get the same range in the summer and winter months as I did in its first year (63+ and 38+ respectively). Since the majority of the driving remains 99.9% city, my lifetime fuel economy is 0.1 L/100km. Similarly, the lifetime efficiency with electrons is 11.7 Kwh/100kms.

However, I also see a larger number of battery modules now with a voltage delta of 0.02 (or larger) than I did in the first year. I perform a battery test every 6 months.

 

I think this is probably within the expected normal range of battery capacity loss, but possibly a little more than average. Sacramento gets pretty hot in the summer, which is not great for battery degradation. I never noticed using 6.4 KWh to charge the battery from 0-100%. The most I ever noticed using was 6.12 KWh, even shortly after purchasing my 2020 prius prime. See below for a graphs estimating my usuable battery capacity over time. The first graph looks bad because it is zoomed in to make the difference more noticeable. The graph below it is to scale, which looks like it barely degraded at all. I estimate there was about a 9% degradation over 4 years and 80,000 miles. However, that is almost all EV miles. I use about 10-20 gallons of gas a year to drive 18,000-19,000 miles. The battery has been cycled 2.25 times a day, 5 days a week for most of its life. It is also parked in the Inland Empire during the day 5 days a week, which gets even hotter than Sacramento. A year or two ago I purchased custom sunshades for every window, which helps it stay a little cooler when parked. The only thing working in the battery's favor is that it almost never sits fully charged for more than 2 hours. My suspicion is that time matters more than miles unless someone is cycling the battery as excessively as I do.

 

Our Prime is a two driver car and I charged it mostly twice a day. Our driving style is very different, hard EV use (some hwy and all seasons) and soft EV use (rarely above 40 mph and mostly under 35 trying to maintain my own personal acceptable EV range ). We're at 90k miles currently and only charging once a day for the last year, mostly because I gotten bored with trying to maintain EV range and also wanting to learn more of the programming limits in HV mode.

I've noticed ( when I'm at a chargepoint ) kWh's in is in the 5.x s range now too. I was surprised when I first saw that but it looks like it's pretty normal comparing it to what other are also seeing.

I"ve posted before that I've also seen DrPrius fully charged voltage and --- SOC voltage differing about a volt higher recently at 375 and 331 volts respectively.
I'm always curious just how much programming Toyota has added to the battery management systems in the Primes.

@jerrymildred used a kilowatt on the EVSE extensively for several years and posted several spreadsheet screenshots over the years that give a really good estimation of just how much the - kWh s in - does change both short and long term. If Jerry sees this thread I hope he'll add his thoughts here too..

 

I hope so too because he's a good guy.

The Prime is a dual-fuel ride and what it lacks in range it makes up for by being immensely flexible, long legged, and the G4s are pretty reliable.
It's hard to gauge battery degradation accurately IN a PHEV but 11% seems both plausible and acceptable over a 5 year haul.
I suspect that even people who use their batteries more than their ICE and live in places that actually have four seasons have about the same performance.

Good Stuff!

 

Thanks for these examples, everyone. A pretty clear picture appears to be emerging. A limited/modest loss even after several years and in high mileage cars. That bodes well for overall longevity.

Does anyone have experience with earlier PiP? How many years did they last before traction battery capacity got very low?

 

I can't say much for how long the PiP packs last since I had one on a 2 year lease. I did charge it a lot though and didn't touch the gas cap for a full year after taking her home. Back in 2014 ( my model year ) there was torque, scan gauge, and a few others still listed in the priuschat odb2 apps sub forum - but finding pids and or an app that supported the plugin was not a walk in the park. The only really real way to gauge pack performance was using techstream, and if you've ever used pirated techstream on a new car, well all the more power to ya. And without a good baseline set of stats to compare over the years of use, it's really just shooting ducks at the carnival trying to guess at what a base set of stats might have been.

My first hybrid still doesn't have even one app dedicated to it's model,. year or Gen and even manufacturer, at least that I can find.
I still have my old scangauge2 that I sent in once to have it programmed with pids for my first hybrid car. I fiddled with adding pids for the PiP and used it a lot over the two years driving the PiP. Until I started trying to test pids from devs. It still works and has ;pids for both my first hybrid and the PiP, but it also has some uniquly strange stuff going on inside the custom pids area of the gauge.

 

You average 11.7 kWh/100 km, including with winters? Wow, my driving is way worst than that. My best consumption is during fall and spring time where the AC use is minimal and I average 15.5 kWh/100 km during those months.


And way worst on winter

 

Yeah, I'm very lucky with my daily driving routine even though I live in Winterpeg. And since I still have two primes (a 2018 and a 2020), their behavior and performance are almost identical with the 2020 LE being marginally better at this game.

However, the claim I had made above was for the 2018 Adv model.
The lifetime on this 2018. The range is pretty much the same at this time of the year, as in previous years.


The winter months for 2024:


The daily during peak summer ( as per past years, will get a bit better by the end of August):


Cheers

 

I see your AC load is almost nil. Do you mostly keep it off?

I managed 10 kWh/100 km yesterday but that was for a trip where my avg speed was around 55 km/h and a length of 15 km. That was on two way roads. I took the highway on the return trip (17 km) and my consumption was now 15 kWh/100 km with a speed increase to just 61 km/h, although most of the length (about 12 km) was highway at a speed of 110 km/h.

 

The fan is never OFF. However, the AC or heat pump is only used long enough to achieve de-humidification or window defogging.
Also, cars are never parked outdoors so severe climate adjustments are unnecessary.

Cheers

 

Oh, that sure will help lol.

 

Here's the relevant cells from the spreadsheet I kept for tracking my Prime's efficiency and costs. I only checked it occasionally since I didn't often use up all the EV range and I traded it in a couple years ago.