First time owner. Is this normal?

Normal. Its not much of an ev only car.

The key factors when normal are the battery charges most of the way only when driving. It will not fully charge while motionless in Ready. Second a good high voltage battery will allow the engine to stop at lights without forcing it to start.

Hybrid AC compressors run on high voltage battery power which gives you ac when in Ready regardless if the engine is running. However it will discharge the battery fairly quickly if not moving, forcing the engine on. But normally not at a traffic light if the battery has good capacity.

 

How many miles on the car? Sounds like your hybrid battery has lost its capacity and you can restore capacity through doing three successively deeper discharges and recharges with a high voltage trickle charger and some light bulbs for the discharge. You can build this gear yourself, or buy an adjustable DC power supply that can do 250volts and 1/3rd amp. Or buy a Prolong or Maxx Volt products.

Or just upgrade to a new Sodium-Ion pack to get better all round performance than even when the car was brand new.

Also if you let us know where in the US you live, someone on here might live near you and can do the work for you.

 

welcome!
sounds normal for an old prius

 

Have you driven any Prius before? Sometimes people come to the car with distorted expectations.

The car has a small battery, which is enough to recover a little energy that would otherwise be wasted in some circumstances, and give the engine a little extra boost in other circumstances, and do little of either, most of the time.

The car's most efficient operation is when it is doing little of either. The efficiency of capturing energy into the battery and getting it back out is better than older cars just wasting it, but not better than just getting the right amount of power from the engine in real time and using that.

So that's what the car does—most of the time.

A big part of the car's efficiency just comes from being able to use a smaller engine with a more-efficient combustion cycle, so it is right-sized for most of your driving, and a brief boost from the battery comes in at those higher-demand moments that most cars have to upsize their engines for.