I noticed that sometimes when I'm in a traffic jam and barely moving, I get empty bars in my 5 minute displays. At first I thought that was because I didn't go far enough for the display to register (even though I went a mile or so in the 5 minutes), but then I had a bar appear in the middle of a jam where I had to drive uphill and was getting bad mileage for a little stretch. So, my new theory about the blank bars is that that's 5 minutes where you don't use any gas at all. The computer tries to divide distance by gas usage, and errors. Does that make sense to anyone else or is there a different explanation.
The blank bars are when the gasoline engine never came on, when you were using solely electric power (even up to a few miles). This has happened to me often in heavy, heavy traffic. If you use the gas engine even a little bit (ie: press on the accellerator just a little more than you actually need to) the engine will come on and the 5-minute bar will register...
The blank bar startled me when it arrived on my '06. My '04 under the same circumstances would have a full bar. Never did I have a blank bar on the '04. Definitely a change in the software.
You are correct. Here's why... the Prius "thinks" in metric, and the MFD info is converted to US units for the US models. On Japanese, Canadian, and European cars, the MFD reads in L/100KM (or do the JDM cars read KMs/L ?? either way, same difference). If the ICE doesn't come on in 5 mins, that's 0 liters consumed, so the MFD shows a blank space. Since the MFD shows converted data, a blank 5 min bar is shown on the US models due to the division by zero error (as you postulated).
Excellent! Hearing this makes me very happy. The first time I saw this was right after I installed my speed wire interrupt switch. Thought I'd screwed something up for sure. But sure enough... this has happened to me exactly twice - and both times were when the ICE did not run for five minutes. Still pretty odd!
That just happened to me in traffic yesterday. I was driving from NH to MA, and a car loaded up with stuff on the roof blew past me just after a toll booth (EZ-pass helps on fuel efficiency too, since you don't have to come to a complete stop, hehe). About 40 minutes later I pulled up to a mile-long traffic jam. A firetruck drove past as I got to the back of the line, so I knew there had been an accident. I crawled through traffic at a slow enough pace that the ICE didn't turn on for at least 5 minutes, and I got the blank bar. I immediately guessed that it was just because I hadn't used any gas during that period, so it didn't really alarm me, but I was wondering if that would throw off the avg calculation for the tank. So, now to tie in the first part of my story, when I got to the front of the traffic line, the accident involved 4 or 5 cars, and at the very front, flipped around backwards in the left lane was the same car that passed me at the tolls earlier. Some of the stuff from the roof was on the road, but I expect that it was jarred loose by the accident, not the cause of it, since it didn't seem to be strewn across the road too far back. An EMT had a backboard out, but I'm hoping everyone was OK. An SUV in that same accident would definitely have rolled.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(wilco @ Aug 7 2006, 11:09 PM) [snapback]299438[/snapback]</div> Actually, the Classic Prius metric MFD has a real division by zero bug in it.. The bug is this: when the car is moving and in stealth mode, the bar reads 0L/100km, which is as it should be (0L consumed, but I'm adding distance 0/X=0), but when stopped, the bar goes to infinity (ie pegged at 10L/100km on the display, because 0L consumed/0 distance traveled causes the computer a headache), and every 5 minutes that you're at a complete stop, it pops up another 10L/100km bar, so if you leave your car on, even if the engine doesn't run at all, you'll get a screen full of poor mileage bars which is extremely misleading *BUT*, the calculated average displayed below doesn't actually change unless gas is used or you are moving.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(c4 @ Aug 8 2006, 08:44 AM) [snapback]299601[/snapback]</div> Interesting... I've never been lucky enough to go for a drive in a classic... maybe when we get that Vancouver Prius meet happening!
