Will driving limited miles kill the hybrid battery?

the gen 3 and 4 work similarly. discussion of 20 and 80% are beind the scenes numbers. the battery icon will show one through full bars.

if your 17 has never gone to 'full' on the icon, that is because you haven't driven it under the circumstances that would fill it.

or it is defective. but if your mpg's are good, that is unlikely.

a full 12v will reduce the need for the hybrid battery to charge it, but only a little bit at the beginning of the drive. unlikely you would notice any difference on the icon.

 

Watch this video.

 

If the traction battery was full more than on rare occasions, you wouldn't be able to regenerate on braking. The battery is like an energy spring. It has to have room on both ends to be effective. If it's always empty, you'd have lots of place to store your braking energy, but then the battery can't help keep the engine at its most efficient power level. If it's always full, then it'll be a great help to the engine, but no help to the brakes. About 60% is the sweet spot, so if driving demands cause the battery to get above or below that, the car puts it back at that level at its earliest convenience. That's part of the magic that makes the Prius so incredibly fuel efficient.

Indicated full and indicated empty have to be rare events or there's no sense in having the battery. Imagine how uncomfortable the ride would be if your suspension was either fully compressed or fully extended under normal driving conditions. Actual full would be really bad and actual empty would be catastrophic.

 

No. That would ruin the battery in short order. Toyota doesn't let their batteries fully charge or discharge. It does charge to an indicated 100%, which is actually about 83% when I plug it in. Or, if I go down a 6,000 foot descent from a mountain, it'll regenerate up to an indicated 100%. But in normal hybrid mode driving, it's a hybrid and acts like one. Whatever charge is in the battery when I switch to HV mode is the centerline that the system wants to maintain. In EV mode driving it acts like (guess what) an EV.

 

That may be true of SOME lithium batteries, but not all. Some designs have a definite shelf life. The design used in a hybrid would almost certainly be one that has a long life even if it is lightly used.

 

Full bars on the battery indicator should only happen after either lots of braking (I mean LOTS, not just more than usual.) or going down a very big hill. It should be very rare except under extreme conditions. Once it's full, you have no more regenerative braking capacity.

 

Yep - it happens sometimes when you least expect it. I was on a motorway run yesterday and it filled right up - probably depends on traffic flow, but sometimes difficult to explain.

 

As Alan said, it can happen when you don't expect it. Sometime, you're just accelerating and decelerating more than you realize. That'll ratchet it up.