My Prius did not cope all that well with a very cold weather day up here in sunny Alberta. The heater blew "warm", but not "hot", which made it challenging to keep the windshield from frosting up, etc. Still competent, but not stellar or even on par with my old '86 Nissan Sentra! thread: http://www.priuschat.com/forums/cold-weath...ing-vt5814.html My thermostat was checked and declared fully functional (as I expected!). Talked to my service manager about a winter front, and he said that Toyota Canada STRONGLY DISCOURAGES ANY MODIFICATION OF THAT TYPE. With the inverter under the hood as well as the ICE it might lead to overheating. I quote: "you'll just have to grin and bear it on those really cold days." So I'll continue to use the block heater and will update again once we've endured a few more "Arctic High Pressure Systems".
BW: Winnipeg gets the same cold weather as you do, so I can sympathize. I have the same problem if I have to park outside. I think the tiny aluminum motor goes a long way to explaining the lengthy warmup in cold weather. My local Toyota dealer strongly discouraged a winter front, simply because there is no temp gauge. You wouldn't know you had overheated until the idiot lights came on, along with the Red Triangle Of Doom. For city driving below 60 km/h, I doubt a winter front would help that much, especially on a car with electric cooling fans. Winter fronts help the most on the highway, but I'm not sure if I should use one due to the lack of a coolant temp gauge. My folks have a 2003 Buick LeSabre Celebration Edition, and it has a coolant temp gauge. The Driver Information Center also allows you to scroll through different engine parameters: instant coolant temp, instant oil pressure, volts, etc. Surely with a CANbus networked car, a fairly large dash center-mounted LCD, that Toyota could have offered the same to us? You can retrieve that data with a scan tool, so it would have taken minor programming to present coolant temp or oil pressure on the LCD.
