Hello all! I currently live in a place in which charging is not convenient. My daily commute is a 6-mile roundtrip so using the EV mode without going through the engine warming cycle is helpful. What I do currently is that whenever I have a chance of driving on the highway, I switch to the charging mode to charge the battery to 80% for my short commute. However, I realize that when using the charging mode, it only takes about 30 mins to charge the car to 80%. This is way faster than plugging in. I wonder whether the frequent usage of the charging mode will affect the traction battery life due to the large current or overheating...
There is a battery management system that monitors things like the battery's heat. If it gets too hot, the system will stop charging. On top of that, charge mode only goes to 80%, as you note. It is also DC charging, which is what CHAdeMO is. Every Prime in Japan has that, and is likely how Prime's are regularly charged there. With Toyota's track record with traction batteries, I wouldn't worry.
I think the short answer is: kinda! For the longer answer, I'd read through this article: Battery Lifetime: How Long Can Electric Vehicle Batteries Last? | CleanTechnica The relevant portion is this: I suspect the forced charging mode falls in the fourth category. However, the scale of the impact is unclear. You might be able to force charge every day and it would only shorten your battery life by a minute. Toyota, who warranties the battery up to 100k (or 150k in CA emission states) seems confident enough in their batteries even with this mode that I would trust them. Personally, I wouldn't worry about it and just charge it like you want. If this mode truly does shorten battery life significantly, I'd rather have it fail sooner (while under warranty) than later.
The charge-rate is no where near fast enough to fall into that category. In fact, that's the regular rate for some at home charging. Here's lots of real-world data I collected to share that very information. Notice the 7.2 kW is quite consistent with what you'd expect to get from a JuiceBox or ClipperCreek.
Charge gives u really bad l/100 or mpg do u really feel like it's with using ev... HV mode will automatically charge when it feels that it's efficient to. Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.
