Not sure why, but going into the purchase I didn't think about the awesome benefit of essentially having another mile+ of EV usage before you arrive home. At face value people only count the EV miles before it goes to HV mode as true EV miles. But you really want to use up every bit of battery you have when you know you will have a charge. So, when I'm about a mile or more from home I try to stay in the EV side of HV and run that battery down to 2 or 3 bars. I assume all you veterans have been doing this for a while?
it's great isn't it? and after you charge, the ice doesn't have to come on to fill it back up. what an incredible machine!
I use that trick too, but it's over as soon as you hit a stop sign or red light. There's just not enough juice left in the HV batt to accelerate from a dead stop without people behind you cursing you out or having old ladies on the sidewalk going faster than you are.
haha ya...but see, if you live in Nebraska people aren't behind you unless it's a major street so it's all good
I can take advantage of that regardless, since my driving is either well within EV range or well beyond it. And once the engine is warm, shut off is very quick for things like accelerating from a light.
I've often wondered if they could put a large capacitor in the circuit that could sip power from the battery over time and release a ton of it really quickly for brief accelerations in "golf cart mode". It would make it much more usable. I always curse the ICE because the way I drive it goes so long in between starts that almost every time the ICE starts it has to go through the warm up.
That certainly sounds like a good idea, maybe T will address that some day. If you read the regular Prius (non-PIP) forums- that seems like a very common complaint in the standard Prius too. I had a 2012 Five before the PIP and I remember how difficult it was to keep the ICE from firing up in EV mode. I also wish there was some sort of manual recharge function where we (rather than the ECU) can control EV battery recharge at highway speeds. There's times in my daily commute where I could swap a few mpg at 65mph on flat roads for a few low speed EV miles on the secondary roads. It would be an interesting experiment to see if you could outsmart the ECU and get better mpg at the end of your trip than the PIP computer could get.
Nearly 2/3 of my 17 mile commute is highway, so I can't avoid the ICE coming on, but when I got home last night and the shutdown readout said I got 242MPG, I can live with it.
