Battery Indicator

The computer manages the battery SOC to be the most efficient for the car. When it turns green, you are in the last two bars from totally full, but unless you are regenerating down a long grade, the computer will use more and more electric drive to keep the battery from being totally full. If it is too low, the last two bars turn purple and the ice will run all of the time. If you can try to keep it between half up to the green, it will give you some great milage even with the ice on. After it is above half, try getting on a fairly flat road where you can get up to about 48 MPH and let of the accel, then lightly put your foot back on just enought to keep the car at a steady spped, and you should see long streaches of 70-80 MPG.

 

to go along with the second post, the Prius is designed to maximize the battery life. to this end, what you see on the screen is actually only a portion of the range of the battery. the bottom is 40%, the top 80%. by never fully discharging or charging, the battery lasts longer (you can look up the chemistry behind the batteries online if you want a more detailed explanation). To furthur enhance battery life, the Prius tries to keep the charge somewhere in the middle (ie the blue region). if it gets two low (to just two bars), the bars turn pink and the prius will even be willing to run the engine to charge the battery, at the cost of MPG. if it gets too high (the top two bars and it turns green), the prius is more inclined to use the battery to bleed off energy. people have even reported that, when they had full bars, the engine would cycle on and off while at a stop as the car tries to bleed off energy.

so the short answer to your question: yes, it's normal.

and to your implied question: there are 3 colors, pink (for lower charge), blue (for normal), and green (for high charge).

 

A friend asked me a question along these lines, and being new to this, I don't know the answer. What if, on a long downslope, you achieve full SOC (either what the battery will take, or what the ECU is willing to feed it), but you're still gliding. Does the car simply "shut off" the regen feature (requiring that all slowing now be done by friction braking), or does the motor/generator continue to offer resistance (either dumping the excess juice to a dummy load or deactivated in some other fashion)? Of course, for me this is totally academic -- we don't have a lot of long downslopes in the gulf coast area, but I still want to learn all I can about this car. TIA for any input.