EV On/Off Charge Depletion Miles and Control Not Making Much Sense

1) you need to learn how to search. the ev range is just an estimate of your past driving. it's like the dte gauge. you have a full tank, but the harder you drive, the faster you run out of fuel and it takes that into account estimating the dte of your charge and your gas tank. if you want it to go back up, you have to drive slower, on leveler ground with no climate control.

2) the switch does work, but it does use up about 20% of your charge anyway. charge it up, switch to hv and take a long trip. you will never run out of ev miles.

 

The answer to your first question is this: The Charge Remaining indicator converts the charge in the battery (Amps or kilowatts) into distance. It does this based on your driving habits. If you always start your fully charged car and drive at 15 or 20 MPH until depletion, your range will go way up. If you always start your car and get on the freeway, like I do, your range will be about 10 miles.

 

My mileage guess o meter, like yours has dropped over the last 7 months. It was 13.5 then 12.5 then 11.5 now 10.5, but it still goes anywhere from 10 to 17 miles on pure EV. It all depending on the terrain and speed I drive. I almost wish they’d leave the computer guessing game out of the PIP and just give state of charge.
If your driving on pure EV for say 11 miles, then run out of charge, and you keep traveling 35 MPH, or less, (on fairly flat terrain) I find the car will then use more of the hybrid battery reserve and keep the car going in pure EV mode for a lot longer. That’s how I’ve gotten 17 miles of pure EV range.

 

sure, but think of it this way. in a regular car, if you drive it hard, or in winter or hilly areas, you get much lower mpg than if you drive easy, in mild climates with flat terrain. it's the same with ev and the meter is simply relecting some average combination of your past trips. mine was up to 16.5 by the end of summer, but now, with cooler weather and driving home at night using headlights, it has dropped to 14.6.
it goes into your toal mpg average. it is used to power the car along with the ice. not sure why they didn't program it to retain full ev but keep in mind, the car is designed to give best mpg and lowest pollution, not the most ev miles.

 

me too!

 

What I do is turn off EV on one hill I go up. It's on the freeway so the ICE comes on anyway.

When the EV range is gone and you go down a long hill the EV range the display behaves oddly. It will go into EV mode only after it has added about .8 to .9 miles of EV range but it will eventually let you go back into EV mode. The best I have done is 1.2 miles of EV range.

 

Q1: The range is calculated dynamically isn't it? Do you begin your commute every time with an uphill climb or bumper to bumper traffic? Your car has likely just learned that for your driving, 13 miles is not a realistic range.

Q2: Selecting HV/EV, eco or power is only a suggestion that you make to the car. The car is programmed to operate optimally in a variety of conditions for safety, efficiency, etc, and it will override you constantly. Hopefully a team of engineers put some work into the transmission programming and they know better than us.

Basically, the goal of the programming of the transmission is to get you the best results. Its so cool to use EV for 10 straight miles, I know! But a lot goes into how the electric and gas motors propel the car. If everyone was able to cut on and off the different functions whenever they wanted, on average, PiP drivers could be getting less miles per tank of gas. They would try some scheme to save their EV miles and it would cost more gas than it saved potentially.

The ICE for example, when activated momentarily in EV mode, will stay on for 60-90 seconds. You can't turn it off. Probably just a safety feature. Unless you talk to the engineers who designed it, its hard to know exactly what your automatic transmission is doing and why.

 

First of all, the EV 'range' indication, below your battery display, is just an estimate. How you drive, in EV mode, is what makes the difference in your EV "range" indication.
Don't confuse that with your battery state -of -charge. Your battery is fully charging today, just like it did on day one.

Second, the EV/HV switch doesn't turn anything on or off. Don' think of it like that.
In EV mode the car will predominately use EV to move, but can use the gas engine if demand is high enough.
In HV mode the car will predominately use Gas to move, but can use EV if demand is low enough.

That, right there, tells you where the engineers intended each source of energy to be targeted.

High speed, high load (hill climbing) is best accomplished with the gas engine.
Low speed, low load (down hill, level) is best accomplished with EV

If your complete travel distance, to the next charge, is within your EV range, use total EV.
If your complete travel distance, to next charge, is outside your EV range, learn how to switch between EV/HV where it's most efficient to attain the greatest overall MPG efficiency.
If your complete travel distance, to next charge, is a really long trip, several hundred miles, it doesn't really matter where you use the EV.

If you just use up all your EV range, right from the start, without regard to speed or load, your EV range indication will begin to decrease, lower and lower. That's what's happening to you, and that's what happened to "SocialSuzy" but she never seemed to "get it".

So, your poll is ambiguous. Do you want to know how many miles of estimated 'range' other drivers are seeing displayed when they fully charge, or are you wanting to know how many actual EV miles other drivers are achieving with a full charge? The two are quite different, but vaguely related, as explained above. It all depends are how smart, sharp and involved you are about using the two sources of energy available to drive the car. It is a Hybrid, after all.

 

It makes no difference in a trip that long. You're traveling hundreds of miles, and about ten of them will be electric-only. When you average it all out, the ten EV miles will have little effect. You'll get between 45 and 60 MPG, depending on your driving habits, but the EV miles won't have much effect.

 

Ive explained the "EV GUESTIMATE" several times....but i have to say, this is by far the best wording ive seen! kudos!

BTW OP....on the EV/ICE Ratio screen, you can toggle the trip button to change from ratio 1 to ratio 2.

Dan

 

If you have a full charge at the beginning, and immediately hit the EV/HV button to force the car into HV mode, the car will "consume" some EV miles as the engine goes through it's warm-up cycle. What is happening is that the car is running the engine in a low-load mode and using the battery to help propel you along. Once the engine is up to operating temperature, it will switch to using the engine primarily and start restoring those "lost" EV miles. It usually takes me about 10 minutes to get those "lost" miles back.

 

Well I had the same thing happened to me this week. From 12+ to 10.3 miles. The last 3 days I left the house going north, uphill, and my range went down each day. Its a few mile uphill followed by a few downhill. The first day The 12+ mile range depleted faster than the actual distance I drove.

Today I left going south, and moderately flat as I live at the base of a canyon road leaving the city. I had an EV range of 10.3 and traveled 4 miles with a remaining EV of 7.7mi instead of the expected 6.4. The flat terrain needed less power than my usual route this week. So I think your going uphill or through heavy traffic and your using more EV than you would need in more moderate conditions.

Try going a route that involves more flat driving and see if your EV is depleting slower than your rate traveled.

 

I was looking at that the other day. Are you using 1 per tank of gas and 2 per trip?

 

I've only had my PIP for the last week and this is how I use up my EV miles. My commute is mostly flat with some overpass inclines.

1. EV mode - 1.5 miles from home to freeway - It's low speed and maximizes my EV range. If I used HV, the engine would growl trying to warm up. It never turns off, not even at a light until it is warmed up. This seems wasteful to me.
2. HV mode - 30 miles to the Bay Bridge - 62 mph is too slow to drive safely on the freeway. Plus the engine is being warmed up while being used. It is better off warming up an engine by driving it gently than letting it idle.
3. EV mode - 4 miles approaching Bay Bridge - Traffic slows to a crawl so it's a waste to keep the engine running while barely moving.
4. HV mode - 20 miles from Bay Bridge to exit - EV is no good for high speed.
3. EV mode - 1.5 miles from freeway to work - EV is best for low speeds.

I don't get to plug in at work so I save about 4 miles of EV for the return trip home. If I had any range left when I got home, I would pull to the right lane and attempt to not piss off too many cars at 62 mph using up the rest of my EV before I get to my exit. Once the car is forced into HV mode, there's still the standard hybrid battery charge remaining for low load <42 mph EV when I exit that takes me the rest of the way home in EV.

I don't know if this is the most efficient way but this is how I am going about for my first tank. I'm averaging 70 mpg at an average 28 mph according to the computer with a full charge every 107 miles.

Oh yeah, my EV battery range said 13.1 miles when new. Then it said 10.8 the next charge after a spirited showing off to my wife. I drove it more conservatively and the last two charges rose to 11.7 and now to 12.9. Toyota should've explained it better but I'd much rather have a realistic rolling estimate of my EV range based on my own driving style rather than a static number that is too conservative or too optimistic. I'm still looking for an explanation of the RH tray in the trunk of the car. Why is it molded like the LH tray as if it were meant for something specific?

 

i use 1 per trip and 2 lifetime.