Shifted into Park in Automatic Car Wash

Especially when it rains upward at high pressure.

My owner's manual does recommend "Wash the vehicle immediately in the following cases: ... after driving on salted roads ...". I don't always manage "immediately", but I do figure Toyota probably knows what they're talking about where corrosion risk is concerned.

-Chap

 

The granite blasts away your clear coat and then paint to get to metal. The salt is really only a problem if left to oxidize metal. See where I am going with this??? On the outside painted parts of the car as long as you have a good paint coating and clear coating a car wash is useless. But that's not the problem. The problem is eating away your wheels, your struts, your underbody, all the good stuff under the car. And where we are, it does sometimes rain nearly horizontally, but I have yet to witness an upward-reverse rain storm where the undercarriage of the car is blasted like in a carwash.

As for putting it in D instead of N, that won't help regenerate. You need to be going 7mph (in the GenII, lower in the GenIII but still not super low) for regen to take effect. Even with an almost dead 10yr old traction battery, I had no problems leaving it in N for 2-5 minutes as it winds its way through the car wash. If you leave the AC on, then yes it will drain super fast. So don't do that.

 

You're correct, regeneration will not occur; braking does that and cuts off about 7 mph. However, the ICE will start and begin generating electricity to recharge the batteries.

 

I'm not sure they want cars running in their car wash. Maybe just avoid pull along car wash.

 

@2k1Toaster summed it up very well. The solution is to simply turn off excessive loads on the traction battery while you are in "Neutral"

Also try not to enter the wash if the battery is showing three bars or less. I use these types of car wash on a regular basis. Only one time did I experience the problem being discussed in this string. And sure enough, I had the A/C on and blasting away.

Anyway, just turn the A/C off, you won't be without the A/C for long in the wash.

 

Okay, I had this at what we call ‘road works’ in the UK. I pulled up behind the queue, which was slightly uphill, and di what I have done for 20 years in ‘ordinary’ automatic transmission cars, and dropped the Prius 3 into neutral.

It took only a couple of minutes, and there had been the uphill climb already, depleting the traction battery I presume, and the warning came up ‘put into park traction battery etc’. The triangle popped up, all as described.

To skip ahead, once I got home I decided to sit awhile and let the engine run as it had decided to, and knocked it into neutral then hit ‘Park’. Now, what I didn’t know, was there is that torque still being applied in neutral, which I think I Claudius mentioned. What flagged this for me, was that the front of the car abruptly dropped a few mm, like a car does when the attempt to drive it forward is ‘almost’ being made, but then the applied torque is let off.

So I agree with broadly the idea that the warning maybe ought to be ‘place the vehicle in Park or Drive to allow traction battery to charge’ or similar.

So I am just going to suggest, Neutral is merely Drive but without final drive being allowed to actually propel the vehicle. And if I guess right from the small amount I know about the transmission, this means in effect, one of the MG’s is trying to turn something while either the other or the ‘gas’ engine is opposing the motion.

My engine was running at the time from what I remember, although there was a racket from other vehicles it’s hard to be sure.

So my complete guesswork theory, does explain my traction battery getting run down, as an MG is ‘trying’ to do something, and burning energy, but something else opposes it, hence you don’t move.

But, this doesn’t quite fit with the facts earlier set out, which is that the whole issue is the engine cannot start so the traction battery does not get replenished, and that in fact ‘Neutral’ obviously isn’t really that state at all.

Nonetheless, I now have a solution, which is to knock it into ‘Drive’ and if I relinquish the idea my engine was on at the road works in the first place, this will permit the engine to start and replenish the battery to a safe level.

So Prius chat works for me! And although I don’t think even the venerable ‘Weber Auto’ has explained why this odd Neutral situation in a Prius where the gas engine cannot start up happens, it looks like I can see ‘Place into Park’ and think ‘Place into Drive or Park’. Such a situation is called ‘interlock’ I think by manufacturers (I am thinking of my old Passat where an embossed icon of a shoe on a brake appeared lit in red, when a certain combo of actions was disallowed).

Thanks for giving me a workaround that doesn’t involve dropping the ‘P’ pawl into place, I would feel the need to press the foot-parking-brake on the hilly roadworks I was on, and haven’t quite mastered a non-slipping hillstart yet.

 

Just keep it in Drive; the car won't charge in Neutral. The one time I use Neutral is when parking on a slope, when I want to end up with a tire angled into a curb.

In keeping with the original intent of this thread: pull-along carwashes are best avoided with this car; seek out those where you drive in and stop, and the carwash machinery passes along the length of the car.

 

You're overcomplicating it. In Neutral, no electrical power is sent to or accepted from either MG. So the engine, if it isn't running, won't be started (because that requires sending power to MG1). If the engine is running, it keeps running, and that spins MG1 around in a freewheeling condition. It is possible you could notice a tiny torque at the wheels from that, just because the gear train isn't totally frictionless, and you could notice a similar tiny torque making it through a conventional transmission in neutral also.

You don't need power to the MGs to explain "burning energy" and the battery running down, because plenty of the rest of the stuff in the car uses energy, and that's all coming from the battery while you sit there in neutral. The car's basic equipment reportedly uses nearly half a kilowatt in READY, and that's not including heavier optional loads like the A/C that can use two to nearly three kilowatts all on its own.

A way that this car's neutral is a little different from other cars' is that the ECU can override it in a small number of situations described in the New Car Features manual. For instance, if you are rolling down a hill in neutral, picking up speed, and you reach the speed at which the engine needs to be running to prevent MG1 overrevving, the ECU will temporarily ignore that you're in neutral, just long enough to start the engine.