Disable Idle Creep!

[haiyue]

I love the Prius - every aspect of it - except for the pre-programmed idle creep. A normal automatic vehicle has an idle creep - that is, when you let your feet off the gas, the car creeps forward due to the pressure in the torque converter.

The Prius also has this idle creep, except that it is programmed in! When you let your feet off the brake, the computer turns on the electric motor, causing the vehicle to creep forward like a bad automatic! I love stick shifts and I love the way they don't move after you let the brake off. The only probable reason why Toyota added this annoying feature is that they did it to satisfy the general public's marketing and to make it look like any other ordinary automatic when it actually boasts the most advanced CVT in the world!

Is there any way to disable this annoying idle creep feature?

[TonyPSchaefer]

I think people have tossed this thought around and the general consensus was 'no'.

Some argued that the creep is there to keep the driver alert. That is, I have been sitting in the car in a parking lot, get distracted, forget to put it in park and when I take my foot off the brake a little, the car moves forward. That's my wake-up call to put it in park. Before you scoff, I've also left the car on and gotten out thinking that it was off. Stop laughing; your day will come.

Some said, like you indicated, that Toyota did this just to make it feel like any other car.

In the end, I've just gotten used to it. Then again, I've never owned a manual so idling creep is the norm to me.

[vincent1449p]

I agree with TonyPSchaefer.

You may like to check out this link:
Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards; Transmission Shift Lever

Creep force alerts the driver to the vehicle's  
direction of travel while the driver is in the process of releasing the  
brake pedal and minimizes the chance that the driver will be surprised  
due to shifting errors when he depresses the accelerator pedal. Creep  
force is a characteristic inherent to ICE automatic transmission only  
vehicles.

For example, if there is no creep force associated with an automatic transmission equipped vehicle and the driver thought he had selected Drive but instead had selected Reverse, when he removes his foot from the brake and depresses the accelerator, the vehicle would unexpectedly move rearward instead of forward. The unexpected movement of the vehicle rearward may cause the driver to further depress the accelerator. By the time the driver realizes his mistake and applies the brake again, the vehicle may have moved rearward a considerable distance and possibly struck a pedestrian or an object, causing injury and/or property damage.

Besides this safety reason, I actually find this creep force to be very useful in traffic jam. You just need to release the brake and the car slowly creep forward. It causes less fatique on your foot than a manual.

OK, there may not be a way to disable it, but you can try my suggestions (provided that you are on level ground):

1) Shift to "N" if you know the wait will be short.
2) Shift to "P" if you know the wait will be long.

This is to ensure that your HV battery's SOC doesn't get too low as the ICE cannot charge it in "N".

Vincent

[Tideland Prius]

Well, with a manual, isn't it because you're in neutral or your clutch is in?

Same with auto, just stick in neutral if you wanted that effect. Not sure why you don't want the creep. Worse come to worse, just apply the parking brake if you're at a long light and want to rest your foot.

[Devil's Advocate]

Creep good!

Without that flow of paower this car would have nearly zero resistance to rolling. Now try and get your foot from the brake to the accelerator without rolling backk about three feet. There is no clutch to feather so the car would instantly roll backwards.

Granted there may be some way to use the computer to "hold" the car in place but if your going to use that kind of calculating power you might as well simplufy the equations and just always have a little extra juice.

[haiyue]

I like the idea with the neutral - I do that now with the current situation. The reason why I am so annoyed with it is because I used to race Electrathon vehicles (electric powered go-karts) and I've associated the Prius with a silent vehicle like the Electrathon racers.

And of course, in Electrathon racers, there is no idle creep, which is why I dislike the idle creep so much on the Prius.

I absolutely agree that it's a safety issue with the notion of leaving the car in the wrong gear (like reverse) and hitting the gas and getting into an accident. But then, I actually don't mind that reverse beep so much as the creep, so that helps me there.

I will look more into this - there might be something I can do with regards to the ECU about this. I'll have to look into the electrical wiring diagrams to figure it out.....

[GeekyDragon]

Only problem with Neutral, is that when you're in Neutral the hybrid system won't recharge. This could be a problem if you're there for very long.

[DanMan32]

It's in the HV ECU programming. Don't know what you expect to get out of the wiring diagram. They don't provide the schematics of the ECUs.

[jeromep]

Auto creep is good! Very good.

Auto creep is a side effect of the hydraulic system used in regular automatics. Ok, so we all know that. But the side effect is that automatics are easier to drive in hilly cities and are easier to drive in stop-and-go situations. Downtown Seattle is very nasty to drive around in sometimes, and when you are at one of those crazy nearly vertical streets coming up from the waterfront at a stop, well you really do want auto creep there to keep you from really rolling back instead of just a slight roll back.

In stop-and-go traffic, nothing is worse than having to man a clutch all the time to move forward and then move feet around quickly to come to a stop. In those situations it is much easier to drive with one pedal and one foot rather than having to use both feet and 3 pedals.

So, Toyota chose to simulate auto creep, just like they have simulated hydraulic brake pedal feel using a "wet" brake-by-wire system. I couldn't imaging a vehicle which is sold as an automatic not feeling like an automatic when I drove it. That just wouldn't make sense. Frankly, all of these very natural feeling simulations are a modern miracle or very high engineering thought.

hayiue, congratulations on owning a Prius. In spite of the theoretical possibility of removing the electronic creep functionality, I hope you enjoy what the rest of us who are crazy about automatics have come to love.

[DanMan32]

I would be interested in finding out what it's like to not have auto-creep or regen coasting. Would be neat if we could adjust the amount of each, or even turn it off. But it would have to have hill hold, as it was supposed to.