How many green cars...

It's not that simple. The battery bars do not represent even units of energy, whereas the green cars do. Other factors also come into play, such as temperature and the age of your battery, which both affect the ability of your battery to accept charge.

Tom

 

Synergy,

'Twould be best to ignore the Leaf Cars. At best they are Reality Reminders,
more likely they are Tokens of Failure.

How so?

Ultimately, all movement of the car comes from using gas from the tank.

Reality Reminders result from scavenging small amounts of energy when
you have to slow down to accomodate the real world in which you drive:
stop lights/signs, incoming traffic, a really steep hill -- remember you
already have or will have to climb the upside of that hill trading gas,
chemical energy, for potential energy which can only be fully realized by
rolling unimpeded down the hill, and on, and on until you roll to a stop.

Tokens of Failure occur when you have to slow dow due to misjudging time,
speed, and distances. This is just another way to waste gas.

Basically, you want to avoid creating the little Leaf Cars if you're after good
FE/MPGs.

 

Hi Synergy!

I have lived in New England all my life. I can't imagine NOT having mud guards on a car in our climate. I bought them on ebay from Dick Dyer Toyota (best price) and put them on myself. You are a bit north of me (I'm in RI), but we get so much 'slush' kicking up on our cars I think mud guards are a must have around here.

The other item I insisted on was the LCD protector. You can buy it from Nushield. I have a touch screen video game, use the provided plastic pencil, and have seen what happens to a touch screen. Wished I had put the protector on THAT screen sooner. True, you seldom ever need to touch the Prius screen, between the steering wheel buttons and the buttons along the side of the monitor, but I figured it was the safe route.

 

Hi Synergy,

I have additional instrumentation and the bars on the SOC MFD display are not too reliable. They have different switching points discharging, versus charging. And they are also unevenly spaced, as previously mentioned.

But on average, here is a gross approximation. The green cars are 50 watt-hours, or .05 kilowatt-hours (kwh). The Prius battery is something like 3 kwh, but the bars only range from 40 to 80 % approximately, so that range is 40 % of 3 kwh, or 1.2 kwh. And there are 8 bars, so if you divide them up evenly (which we know is wrong, but just for the sake of discussion) that is .15 kwh. .15 / .05 is 3. You would need 3 green cars for the SOC to change about 1 bar.

So, you made a good guess. But due to the uneven spacing, sometimes it will take 2 cars to change 1 bar, and sometimes 4.

 

Uhh... I think your math is a tad off donee (or mine is).

2004+ Prius capacity = 6.5 Ah * 201.6V = 1.3 KWh
1.3 KWh * 40% available (40%-80%) = 520wh available
520wh available / 100 = 5.2 wh per % (or 18,720 joules per %).

green leaf = 50wh
each bar can be ~4%-14% "long"
1% = 5.2wh
9.6% = 1 green leaf

So yes, it can equal one "Bar" or even two - depending on where on the chart it is. Just remember that each green leaf regenerates ~10% and you'll be fine.