Please forgive if this is a totally newbie question, but I'm a little confused. If I'm running my 2015 PIP Advanced purely on EV, and after 12 or so miles run out of charge, it switches to Hybrid, in which the battery has enough charge to go back and forth between the electrical motor and the gasoline engine. Are we talking two different batteries here? How does Hybrid mode have battery power when EV runs completely out of battery power? Thanks in advance ...
one battery. the computer shuts you out of ev when the battery gets down to a certain %, leaving enough charge to use as a normal prius.
That's what I thought. So how does Hybrid mode have battery power when EV runs completely out of battery power?
let's say the battery starts fully charged. (it's a bit more complicated than that because the battery is never charged more than about 80%, or discharged to less than about 20%, to protect longevity) but to you and i, it's fully charged. as you drive in ev, the charge goes down until there's only the same amount as a regular prius. the computer then shuts you out of ev and the engine comes on. now it uses the remaining charge the same as a regular prius, charging and discharging to keep the battery icon around the middle. when you plug in again, as soon as it has more charge than a regular prius, you can drive ev again. this can also be accomplished by regen down a long hill.
So sorry, but I still don't quite understand. If the EV indicator tells me the battery is out of power, how does the HV mode then have electrical power?
because the ev indicator is only giving you info about the amount of charge in the battery allowed for ev driving, not all of the battery. when it goes to zero, the battery still has charge, and a new battery indicator comes on in it's place to show you how much for hv.
I don't see how he could have said it much plainer. The "EV does NOT run completely out of battery power", it just stops using it exclusively when the charge falls down to a certain point.
OP, the car lies to us in many ways. It's not actually out of fuel when it says 0 miles of range left either. In actuality, there is usually over 100 miles of range left and just over 2 gallons of fuel. You could ask why the car continues driving when it's "out of fuel", but the reason it can is that the instruments are lying to us. The battery is not fully charged when the display shows it as full, and it isn't empty when it shows it as empty. You don't want to fully charge or fully drain the battery because it isn't good for it. Likewise, you don't want to run out of fuel, for obvious reasons.
My apologies to Bisco for making him explain it twice ... when I posted my question again, it's because his post appeared on my screen as only "Let's say the battery starts fully charged", and that's all. The rest of the message didn't appear, for some reason, until this morning. Thanks to all for the answers.
