Battery Wore Down in Funeral Procession

Excess charge gets used to spin the engine. In B mode it starts this right away. Without B mode the controller waits until the SOC is at a hight level, and then starts spinning the ICE to waste energy. This is analogous to dynamic braking on a locomotive, where regenerated energy is sent to a big eclectic heater on the top of the locomotive.

If more braking is needed than you can do dynamically, friction brakes come on line.

Tom

 

Thanks, I was beginning to wonder if I had missed something.

As the inverter is electronically disconnected, where does any power generated go? Would it just heat up the coils in the MG motors or does the electronic disconnection still leak a little current?

 

It still leaks a bit of current. It's impossible to build semiconductors that don't (just ask Intel!) As current is flowing, bits of the inverter and MGs will heat a bit, but they're cooled by the inverter coolant loop, whose pump is constantly running and pushing coolant past the power electronics, down through the transaxle, and out to the bottom third of the radiator, then back to the reservoir.