Plug-In Prius: real winter driving

I would test it a few more days, as the temperature change could also have some affect with it being slightly warmer today. Although what you found makes sense.
I am curious how much the PiP uses gas to heat. It makes sense, if you have to use some, may as well use it when the waste heat can be useful.
Sorry about the 3.2, I was guessing on the usable amount of charge.

I am trying to keep as many variables down by leaving the temperature settings the same every day. That way I can be sure differences in efficiency are due to temperature, road conditions, etc.
However, it is incredibly difficult to do so because I always want to see 'but what if I did this'
I will probably settle into a week at a time tests of settings I can control

 

what are you driving zythryn?

 

Most definitely. I just wish I could convince the weather gods to give us the same temperature 3 days in a row
Just from casual observation of your reports, it is starting to look like when it gets colder, lowering overall efficiency, the PiP is using gas to make up for that, rather than cutting into the EV range.
This is a very cool way to handle it in a plug in hybrid, as it would result in less variance of the EV range with the cold. And since most people getting a plug in pay more attention to their EV range, this should be very reassuring and may lead to quicker market adoption.

But I am jumping way ahead of myself on initial impressions. It should be fun to see what the rest of the winter brings.

 

I made 10.5 miles trip today in EV. The windshield and windows started to fog up. I crack-opened (half to an inch) a rear window and the fog cleared up. I had to set the air to go to the windshield and the feet. No engine started and I didn't need heat.

 

A Tesla Model S.

USB, very impressive!
How many kwh used for that 10.5 miles?
Hwy/back streets?
Temp?

Thanks

 

37 Deg F outside but PiP was parked in a warm garage. It was supposed to snow/rain here but no snow yet, just rain.

I took the highway route but I ran into a grid lock. 5 miles took about 30 minutes. On my way back, I took a different city street route (5.5 miles) -- took another 30 minutes.

PiP started with 12.4 miles estimate. After the 10.5 miles round trip, the car showed 0.9 miles left before shutting it down. I would have gotten about 11.4 miles from ~3.1 kWh charge so the consumption was 272 Wh/mi (higher than my 258 Wh/mi average).

I did not need to use the heated seat but had the HD radio playing with the LED DRL on.

 

It's really a Shame that we can't get a Toyota Engineer to confirm these findings and answer our questions.

 

You don't need to read the scrolling display on the Charge Point. You can set it up to send you a summary email and/or text msg. Also, I think you can view your history on line...but they change something on their web site a few weeks ago and it hasn't worked well for a while.

Mike

 

Clean your windows with high quality cleaner (e.g., Meguiar), and you won't even have to worry about that (unless it's humid in the car, caused by a wet jacket, etc.)!

 

What do you mean? In normal Prius you can also keep the engine off with set temperature (fan auto). You can turn engine off after quick warm up with pressing fan OFF button - let say after 2-3 minutes at outside 0°C (32°F). If I keep fan on AUTO and set temperature to 16 °C (60° F) the engine will shut down faster (5-7 min) than if I set temperature to 21° C (70°F) (> 10 min).

Eco mode does affect this threshold as you are observing, but the effect of demanding heat from the vents is way bigger.

 

Some reference the temperature of the coolant. I looked around various display options and could not find any read out for coolant temp. Where do I look?

 

Scangauge, Torque (Android app), or Techstream.. or any other ODB2 reader device

 

Did not understand a word you wrote. My translation guess is "no, nothing internal to the PIP, you have to use some other third party device to measure the coolant temperature."

 

Correct

 

A little off topic since I drive a normal Prius, but I think the behaviour is very similar to plug-in:

I think the very big factor is room (cabin) temp, today I tested with fan off the engine would shut down after 3-4 minutes at -2 °C (28F) (car parked outside) coolant was around 45 °C (113F). I then set the temperature to 16° C (60F) and fan speed on 2, eco mode, the engine shut down when coolant reached 56 °C (132F) and room temp was 7 °C (44F). If I entered the normal mode the engine would start again.
If the car had been parked in a garage and would start with room temp of 15 °C (59F) I'm sure the engine would shut down a lot sooner, what I'm saying is that coolant temp is not the only threshold to shut down the engine.

 

English translation: you have to extract the information from the diagnostic system using a tool that can access that system.