going up hills and mountains on my "new" 3rd gen prius

As a hybrid battery gets old it loses capacity. But most all of it can be recovered by three rounds of deep cycling followed by a full charge and balance after each progressively deeper discharge. Hybrid Automotive & Maxx Volts make products you can use to do this. Or you can build your own system: https://priuschat.com/threads/build-hybrid-battery-maintenance-gear-for-under-100.224153/

And if you can afford it, upgrading to Project Lithium pack will mean you won't hardly ever go below three bars on mountain climbing and can stay in the fast lane at the end of the biggest hill climbs. I do unlimited tech support and discount on install if you use my affiliate link: Toyota hybrid battery upgrade pack– NexPower Energy

 

Is it actually a problem? Are you getting the speeds you request without using the battery?

I'm seeming to remember that long ago (before any Gen3 batteries had enough age to go bad), several Colorado drivers noted that with the Gen3's larger and more powerful engine, it could climb mountains without battery assist that Gen2s could not. This also meant that it could maintain climbing speed indefinitely (at least through Colorado elevations) without losing speed due to a depleted battery. And yes, in some circumstances, it could even do some battery charging while climbing.

The takeaway was, don't expect the same Colorado mountain climbing battery behavior in the Gen3 that you were accustomed to in the Gen2. Though aged batteries are an additional wrinkle not covered by those long ago posts.

Separately, it also seemed that Colorado residents drivings Gen2s had significantly less difficult in mountain climbing than did their flatlander brethren. Numerous flatlanders would lose speed when the battery depleted, while the locals seemed much more able to drive in a way that avoided that problem.

 

Yep the wonder of electricity over internal combustion engines lots of fun of course I live where mountains are almost non-existent in Central North Carolina so until I go to the mountains won't ever see any of this and down at the beach it's all flat land and sea level so again none of this thank goodness yeah I don't think this would be fun for mountain driving actually when I lived in Europe and was driving through the Alps and all that We had real sports cars with real ice engines and climate change and all that hadn't even really been discussed yet on any kind of level .

 

The car is doing what you'd want, and the gen 3 is better at it than the gen 2.

Neither car is a plug-in, so the only energy that is in the battery ever is energy that got there by burning gasoline. (It either got there by the gasoline engine charging it directly, or by regenerative braking slowing you down after gasoline sped you up, or by regenerative braking taking you down a slope after gasoline took you up).

So what you have is, ultimately, a gasoline-powered car, that has a small ability to store some energy and use it to help you with brief power deficits.

That storage has energy-conversion costs both on the way in and on the way out. Any time you get 'help' from the battery on top of the power coming directly from the engine, you have paid tax twice on that 'help'.

Having discovered that you can get more 'help' from the battery by flooring the go pedal up the hill, you can turn that around and see that by lightening up on the go pedal, you can find a speed where the engine is able to get you up the hill without needing battery 'help' at all. Assuming that speed isn't too annoying to following traffic, that will be the speed where you incur the least energy-conversion cost and the least wear and tear on the car.

 

98 HP engine, to the 76 HP in the Gen 2.

 

To me they show up as red X.

Part of that might be the proxy.php issue since the recent PriusChat migration. But even if I fish out the original URLs, I get a "couldn't sign you in" page from Google.

 

Those show up as blank to me. They may be visible to other people who enable JavaScript, or sign into a Google account, or both.

 

That "sounds" like perfectly normal, reasonable behavior. I never see battery charge level drop on large or small hills, unless either the charge starts at more than six segments (of the eight), or else I'm going so slowly (e.g., in a traffic jam) that the engine isn't running.