I have a free public charger in a garage that sits at the top of the hill and which is roughly a mile away from my house. The temperature was 48 degrees before, during, and after the charge. I figured this was a good opportunity to test the "excess regen starts ICE" theory. Well, I can confirm that it happens I had a video going but unfortunately my phone ran out of space before the ICE kicked in. But basically there are two hills, going down the first one didn't trigger ICE, but about halfway down the second one, ICE came on while I was braking. I parked the car and didn't bother waiting for ICE to shut off. Trip summary showed 51 mph for 0.9 miles.
i don't doubt it for a minute. my problem is, i'm going down a slight grade, full charge was 12.6, charge at top of grade is 12.1, ice kicks on about half way down around 30-35 mph and recharge is only upto 12.2.
Just switch it to neutral. I had this thing, the car was fully charged at 10.1, while sitting there setting up the phone mount, it dropped to 9.9. Turned off the car, plugged in the charger, car refused to charge. I think it's for battery longevity reasons.
Putting the car in neutral doesn't override anything, it bypasses the hybrid system entirely and uses only friction brakes for braking.
Not only that, you get no mpg info, only blank spaces. To drive in B or N is not particularly good for the car.
I would classify the bypassing of a system an override. There are a lot of posts on PChat that discuss how to bypass the Synergy firmware in various ways. I am skeptical that any of them will result in better mileage, and some can be detrimental to the car. Working within the Synergy system (ie, pulse and glide) is safer, and probably more productive.
There's nothing detrimental in this particular scenario. The only thing you're doing is forcing the use of friction brakes. It certainly will result in BETTER, rather than WORSE, mileage, since it prevents ICE usage.
Is it burning gas in this case? I assumed it would just be using the ICE as a load on the regenerative braking system. Maybe the engineer wanted to just make sure the ICE was warmed up before using it as a load?
