ICE in EV Mode ... Again

As I've mentioned before, isn't it a Shame that we don't have access to a Toyota Engineer that KNOWS how and why the PIP works as it does?

Yet, we keep plugging along guessing and assuming !!!

 

i tried neutral today, the ice did not fire. so, either it wasn't going to fire anyway, or somehow neutral prevented it. this is getting more and more confusing.

 

i've tried this to no avail. i would love to know battery temps before and after charging in several different ambient temps.

 

i have always been around 40 mph when the ice has fired.

 

actually, the ice has never fired, once it runs for the first time. i have driven and recharged 3 times in one day, and the only time the ice fired was the first drive.

 

but isn't it warmer later in the day as well?

 

not confusing. remember, if our regen hypothesis is correct, this fits in nicely – N disengages the hybrid system completely and therefore disables regeneration.

 

so......you're coasting downhill, in neutral, and you're applying the brakes.............

 

exactly, and it will use friction brakes only. that's the point. so if you leave it in D and hit the brake pedal, it attempts to regen. however, because MG1 is spinning too fast and/or the battery is full and can't accept a charge and/or the battery is cold, no regeneration is possible, and MG1 ends up spinning up and running ICE. because this is the first time ICE is ever spun up, it ends up running its warmup cycle.
but if you put it in N, no regen is ever attempted, only friction brakes are used, and ICE never spins up!
cool?

 

that gear shift lever is pretty tricky tho, I run into trying to put it in neutral when I'm in a car wash, accidently putting in reverse and having the tires buckle on the rollers in the car wash drive train.

 

don't press the brake pedal when doing it and you won't do that

 

force of habit

 

no, the temps are pretty steady during the day. for december, there has been a lot of high 20's, low 30's overnight and high 30's, low 40's during the day. my car is in an attached garage, unheated which usually runs 5-15 degrees above outside air and rarely goes below freezing. also, many times, when i'm out in the evening, the temps are lower than they were all day. the funny thing for me is it fires more often in 40's weather than 30's and we haven't really seen 20's or lower yet.

 

i didn't use the brakes. the hill is just steep enough that if i hit it around 25 mph, i'm going 40-45 at the bottom.

 

so......you just shot through the traffic light/stop sign?

 

Those of you complaining the ICE firing while driving downhill, yes it is because the engine is trying to burn off the excess energy. I work on the edge of a very large hillside. After charging, once I hit the main street there is a steep degrade on the main road. I have to use neutral because once the vehicle goes beyond 85% soc and is regenerating energy on the downslope, the ice will flip on to grab the energy. I watch my SG2 like a hawk and once the vehicle is back to 84.7-85% soc, I put the car in neutral and break the rest of the way down the hill.

If you don't have a SG2 (ScanGauge 2), I'm not sure how you would do this.

 

+1

 

In my case, its not the "normal" excess regen scenario that I'm encountering. I'm hypothesizing that as temperatures dropped (maybe from 60F to 50F or so), there is something else that is triggering the ICE to start.

Now, it could be that the battery doesnt take regen as well as during moderate temps so the threshold is lower.. it could be at 45F, MG1 doesnt like being spun past 5000RPM.. maybe it does have something to do with going past 40 or 42MPH.. I think we're all flying blind and until we have more data, we just dont know.

What I do know though is, for the past 9 months, I've had a really good handle on managing excess regen. However, in the past two weeks when it got relatively much colder here, things have been very different. Its not necessarily the fact that I'm burning gas or whatever, I just want to know why.