Neat and Obscure facts about the PiP

Congratulations, you've given me the first-ever compelling reason to root my Android phone. (In three years when the free Entune period runs out I'll probably have a different phone -- but I'll make sure to get one that can be rooted.)

Interesting. It is good to know there is a way to force shutdown the ICE.

I wouldn't use it too often as it may be bad for the emission system.

Great, force charging still exists. How far did you have to press the accelerator for the ICE to kick in?

I tested your method this morning and it did NOT turn the engine off. The car would refuse to let me turn off the ICE through pressing the HV/EV button until the warmup completed. I'm not sure if you live somewhere warmer that gets the vehicle up to the 130 coolant temp faster, but there seems absolutely no way in my PiP short of turning the car off to turn the ICE off before warmup completes.

did the engine start because you hit the accellerator hard?

Yes, I depressed the accelerator harder than normal going up a hill to trigger the ICE.

I pressed it at least half way. I thought it would give me the same error as if it was in neutral... But the engine went on instead.

If you put the gear selector in B and immediately back into D, then the ICE will spin a few revs without fuel, which should easily blow out any unwanted gases, right?

That IS possible. However, you would need to be moving fast enough to use B under compression without any pressure on the gas pedal. Otherwise, you would simply be introducing more combustion by products.

I tried this today and it did not work for me. I get frustrated as I seem to not remember to turn "Auto" off the night before and ICE turns on in the morning. I'm trying to figure out the right way to just get the fan on without turning on the ICE.

if everything in the climate system is off, temp set to 'low', just hit fan and only the fan will come on.

If you have "Auto" headlights, they auto off timer will not start until all doors are close. The lights will stay on while any of the doors remains open. However, I would assume the car would shut the lights off after a longer period of time to save the auxiliary battery.

This is different. I think what's happening is that you have the heater on, and the only way for the car to warm you (besides the seat heaters) is with the engine heat, so it starts the engine.

I tried this today and it didn't work for me. I floored it to merge into traffic. Once I came to a stop at the next block, I hit the EV/HV button twice and it didn't do anything with the ICE. It continued to run. I pressed it twice more and it still didn't do anything. The HSI display changes but no reaction from the ICE.

When you did it, was the ICE already somewhat warmed up already? I don't doubt that you were able to do this, just trying to figure out if there was some other condition that needed to be met to reproduce this behavior.

Yay! Somebody else wants to help me figure this out. Maybe John will put his ScanGuage to work on this. I got it to shut off twice. It won't work if there's no EV charge left.

On a standard Prius (and the PiP), you can lift and re-depress the accelerator to kill the ICE, under the right conditions of engine temp, speed and state of charge. I don't know what conditions are needed for the EV/HV trick to work, but this thread's all about figuring out secret nitty- gritty details like this.

My question too. It's curious that it came empty.

I noticed also that the tires should be inflated to 40psi, which I plan to do anyway.

I plan on filling it with premium gas, as long as I can afford it...

Why is that wiggleman??

Premium gas will deliver lower MPG. Higher octane gas has higher resistance to combustion, which results in unburnt gas in the Prius Atkinson engine.

Maybe this is true for all car's headlights, but I've never of it before:

If you want to flash your headlights at someone, you don't need to turn on the lights, you simply need to momentarily push high beam/bright selector forward (as you would use in night time driving when no one is approaching you).

An even better way is to momentarily pull the stalk toward you, beacuse when you release it just snaps back to normal.

If the ICE kicks in and I know I do not need to use it anymore on that trip, I just shut down the car at the first stop I get (red light, stop sign, etc...). I wait a second and turn it back on and I am back in EV mode.