Part of my daily commute involve coming down a long winding mountain road. As always, I just let the car regen. The other day the battery was close to full so it started regenning normally and then I could hear it go into a different mode. The regen stopped, the battery was full green, and it switched over to running against engine compression on it's own. Cool. Never happened before.... I have to stop at the end of the hill for a traffic light. Usually here my Prius will "take a dump" ie spin the engine without moving the car or applying fuel. So why do you even need B? Yeah I know. Use B when regen doesn't slow you enough and you don't want to use your brakes. It's just interesting to see how the computer manages the battery so carefully.
I think that's a decent approach. B-mode might minimize manual braking, but really has no other real benefit. You're right, the car is amazing.
This should be recommended reading for all those dumb salesmen who don't understand what the B-mode is for.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(AussieOwner @ Sep 8 2007, 08:20 PM) [snapback]509264[/snapback]</div> B stands for "Brainless salesmen". Tom
If you filled the battery with normal regen down that particular hill, suppose the hill was twice as high? Now you've filled the battery halfway down and you're just on the brakes. B provides an alternative way to toss that extra energy away, and you can either do it all at the bottom or try to regulate it a little more evenly starting from the beginning of the run. This is what makes the hill game so much fun on the stock Prius battery -- figuring out how to minimize all that energy loss. Starting with the pack as empty as you can get it before the downhill is one pivotal strategy, and that's often hard to achieve if you've got traffic around. . _H*
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(hobbit @ Sep 9 2007, 06:24 AM) [snapback]509375[/snapback]</div> I've actually tried getting the battery lower by accelerating up the hill hard, but the car won't have any of that. It's not actually a hill by the way.It's more like Table Mountain!
