Evan's turn for the PHV Prius!

Minor report...
The PHV Prius (#5) was dropped off right on time about 10am this morning. Unfortunately, I work nights and thus got up only long enough to take the keys and see the driver who brought it off to the airport in a cab. He'd driven from Chicago, so obviously the battery was depleted, so I put it straight onto the charger.

And there it has sat all day while I slept. After dinner I did install Jay's Scan Guage so that's ready for when I leave for work in about an hour.

Haven't had a chance to "check" the tire pressures yet...need to do that for sure at some point. Thinking I'll just drive it, with AC, on the highway route to work just to see how it does. I suspect I'll run out of EV just before getting to work (13 miles). But, we'll see.

I've got one more night shift after tonight, and should get some more 'wheel time' starting Wed. and thur. and through the weekend when we'll take the PHV about 3 1/2 hours away to St. Louis (anyone in the area wants to see it, PM me) where I'll be handing off my '04 to my uncle for safe keeping while I'm out of the country.

 

Already planning on that. We'll be driving the PHV and my 2004 up to St.Louis. I plan to top off the tanks and reset the MPG. I'll start with a full battery (or almost full) on the PHV and will just compare MPG when we arrive in St.Louis.

 

First report...Couldn't make it the 13 miles to work in EV...about a mile away the ICE started cycling and doing it's warm up routine even though I showed 2 miles of EV range left. :-(

I'll see if I do any better on the way home (maybe a slight elevation drop).

But clearly the hills are painful for EV in a car of this weight. I did great on the flats, but I can't avoid hills.

 

I made it home with the EV/HV indicator showing 97% EV for the round trip. I could have made it home on pure EV this morning, but decided to gun it at a light when 2 lanes were going to one, and the ICE kicked in and ran its initial warmup cycle...never came on again after that.

You could, but the problem is that it just jumps into an S1/S2 condition and begins that initial warmup phase. So, then you'd do a long EV stretch and you'd just be back where you started and have to go through that inefficient phase again later.

 

Bob, I have no way to accurately measure/monitor what's going on, so the second ICE on time may just straight to S2/S3 for all I know...but I think it just goes by the ICE temp, much like the Gen II.

As I think about it, this might be ripe territory for an ICE temp spoof device. If you have just a few short segments where running on ICE would be beneficial spoof the system into thinking you're already warmed up, gun the accelerator to kick on the ICE for those short segments, then you go back to EV.

 

Here's something intersting though...
I inadvertantly over accelerated from a light very early in my trip home this morning and so had to 'suffer' that warm up cycle for a bit.

As I got close to home the EV range dropped to 1 mile just before a very steep hill I have to climb right before getting home--I fully expected the ICE to kick in...but it never did.

It seems that perhaps, it just has to do the warm up cycle once per EV trip....need to experiment more to confirm, but it's worth watching. And as I stated above, I have to wonder if there would be a way to spoof that and avoid the warm up if you know you can stretch the EV and hit your destination within it's range while avoiding the warm up.

 

There is no noticable drop in power that I can detect.