seeing GREEN BARS more often, as the car ages

maybe is not the whole battery who is become "bad"

...maybe is only a few single cells in one "cell-group" thats close to failure...

Im not sure the Battery control unit of the Prius can detect a "bad cell group" and initiate an Error-Code???

Andreas

 

I have an 08 and I have never seen anything but green. Should I see other colors in the battery SOC chart?

 

The bars are normally blue, but become green when there are 7 or 8, meaning maximum charge has been reached. If you always have 7 or 8 bars, I would say something could be wrong.

 

When I first got the car - back in January - the battery was always green. I didn't see it blue for a couple of months. It just showed purple for the first time on Sunday, after I'd been cruising around a parking ramp for quite a while looking for a parking space.

 

So does the green go all the way down to empty and then the dispaly get "refilled" with blue?

 

Hope it's not too late to get in on this thread and hope this isn't too long a response but this battery behaviour has me worried.
The short answer is yes definitely: more full green AND more of what I call 2 bar hell (where the SOC is at 2 bars and it takes forever to bring it up to normal blue state and the mpg avg goes to hell).
My 2005 Prius has 65k and is 3.5 yo. It does the heavy lifting in our family, soccer dad type errands, and as such can be up and down our hill 5 or 8 times a day. This hill is 1/2 mile long with an average grade of 17% and speed limit of 25mph so the whole way down you are on the brakes. The battery gets a workout both directions and with 65,000 miles on the clock that's a whole lot of charging and discharging.
When new, I didn't pay a lot of attention to the SOC, but when I did, I saw 1 green bar sometimes at the bottom of the hill and going up very rarely a drop to 3 or 4 blue. Now a high proportion of trips down maxes out the battery and I use B mode to reduce friction brake wear. And frequently going up, the SOC drops really quickly to 3 or 2 bars. The confusing thing has been that the drop is less consistent than the fill. It happens more often when the battery is "cold" as in first time up the hill in a day (although the HSD system is up to operating temp and the ICE has been shutting off). Note that here in the San Francisco bay area it is never truly cold, what I mean is the battery doesn't get "stretched" (whatever the hell that means) by driving on the flats.
The full green battery doesn't bother me particularly, but I think it is a symptom of some pathology. The very quick drop off of SOC when put under load however is worrisome. Could it be that some or most of the cells for some reason have developed a diminished capacity where the top is lower and the bottom higher so the available charge is reduced (even though it appears to be the same as when new)?
Needless to say, my mpg avg has been going down with age as well. I used to never get less than 50mpg on any highway trip. Now I have to really work at it (ie drive slower) to barely get 50. But then, sometimes the car turns in stunning averages even after accounting for wind, elevation, etc so it keeps me guessing.
Hope this helps, apologies for the length.

 

My question about the battery display is "What do the different colors mean?

I left my car in park and when into the store and the display showed 3 light lavender lines after 15 minutes in the store. Yes I did lock it while I was gone.

Thanks

 

Search - PriusChat

 

My MFD only shows green battery bars.

 

holy cow, were you going downhill most of the time? In the past 2 days, I can hardly have it stay on Green for more than a minute or two.... Let alone FULL green which I still haven't see....

 

I have seen the battery stay in the green on the highway. It generally happens if I drive 70+mph for an extended period of time, and generally not when there's an A/C load. I can't explain it, but I don't think it indicates a problem.

 

Too bad, it is pretty darn hot up north for the past 2 days, wait til it is cooler I can try to drive w/o AC on and see if there is any diff. (Yes I do know AC uses batt power...)