About to buy Prius C; a few questions

7. One road bike fit in the C, but I have to remove front wheel.

 

Welcome!

1. You may have to unlearn some of your Insight hypermiling techniques to get the most out of the Prius. There is no need to use neutral in this car except in rare situations and even then it is a very advanced technique.

2. The OE tires are very fuel efficient. Until the Energy Saver A/S is offered in that size or something better comes along I would stick with the OE tires in the summer and use your winter tires as needed. It would not be a good economical choice to ditch brand new tires.

3. The c is a hypermilers dream car. Personally I think the c has the ability to get higher FE than the Liftback when hypermiled. If you do a lot of high speed highway driving the Liftback may be better.

4. See #1. The engine (ICE) will not shut down when you put it in neutral. If the engine is already off before you shift to neutral then it will stay off BUT the HV traction battery will not charge while in neutral. I do not recommend shifting to neutral until you learn more about the car so you know when and how to use it most efficiently.

5-7. I cannot answer those. Sorry.

 

2. I have a set of 1st generation Scion xB wheels of the 15" steel variety for my winters. This info to allow you to expand your quest.

 

For #3. I strongly recommend to get at least a C2. Here are some reasons to stay away from C1:

• Seats on C1 is cheap, the headrest of the front seats are fixed. Plus now the front seats came with air bags, it will be tough to find a good seat cover. The back seat don't have 40/60 split. I read from other thread that C2 and up use more modern design too.
• No speakers on rear door, not even a speaker wire?!!!. Will require to add speaker wire if you decide to add speakers later on.
• No arm rest.
• No cargo cover, even if you want to buy a cover later, there were no mechanism for it. Unless you have to buy the whole cargo area harness.
• No cargo light.

 

I think it's largely regulated by the size of the HV battery, which isn't huge. Note there's two common usages of "EV Mode" here in the C forums - it refers both to pushing the "EV Mode" button, which has a fairly limited field of use OR it can also refer to simply driving the car so that the bar on the ECO Score display (or more specifically, the curved bar chart known as the Hybrid Synergy Indiciator or HSI) remains below the mid-point, in which case the car will generally not use the ICE and an "EV" indicator will appear next to the HSI. The latter is the way you may reach speeds up to around 47 mph without the ICE running.

While driving at those speeds on electric only can be rather satisfying - unless you're following pulse and glide techniques, this is almost certainly not an efficient way to drive the car.

There are a couple of threads on this that are worth looking for - I personally do not use Neutral.

No, they do not. The car cannot charge the battery when you are in N.

I have not tried it, but the received wisdom on these forums is quite the reverse - if the engine is on when you switch to N, it will stay on. At high speeds the engine will be on to prevent one of the MGs from overspeeding, but below the ~47mph point having the engine on in N is pointless. Conversely if you switch to N with the engine off, the general understanding on these forums is that the engine will not come on, which means you risk overspeeding the electric motor if your speed increases.

With the ECO Score display showing, I don't find it difficult to make the HSI graph appear in the "neutral" position (no blue and no green showing) to cause a glide, so I therefore don't see the point of using N as a technique, given the disadvantages. I also like having the immeadiate control to adjust my speed by a simple movement of my ankle.

I don't know how it works in an conventional auto, but it does have a parking pawl.

 

MD- as far as getting from your house to the main road, you probably just won't be able to do it because of the warm-up time, which takes 2-3 minutes. In that time, you can't use straight EV- the ICE is always on as its warming up. Besides that, unless you have a hill that you're going to refill the battery on with braking immediately afterward, you generally don't want to be using the EV in the way you're describing, i.e., getting from "here to there" via EV. EV is most useful in a few situations: 1) stop and go traffic on the freeway; 2) parking lots; and 3) most useful, and where the "big mpg" comes in- after getting up to speed in town (25, 30, 35, or 40 mph) with the ICE, dropping back into a very, very light EV (just using a sliver of power, or none at all) to maintain your speed so that you're gaining distance but burning no fuel at all, while hardly draining the battery.

I will promise you this, though- if you're a mpg-minded person, you will NOT regret getting this car. It is profound what it is capable of if you drive it at its most efficient.

 

I have a Prius C (4) and love it. But one thing I will say that's not impressing me is that the EV mode is a marketing gimmick/joke. The concept is cool, but the problem is that it's not implemented in a real-world usable way: if you accelerate to any degree like a person who who's not trying to brake, the EV kicks off with some message letting you know you accelerated too fast. I can get the concept of a top-speed cap on the EV mode, but if a person *wants* to go all EV, then IMO the accelerator should honor the request... and just accelerate as fast as the electric-only motor can muster. For emergency reasons, naturally depressing the accelerator all the way should kick-off EV mode, but that's not how it works now... virtually any acceleration, even a tepid-granny style acceleration, kicks out of EV mode.

 

I see the EV mode button as a bit of a light hold that's easily taken off... staying in EV is mostly down to your foot and the EV mode button just gives you a little assistance in holding the point of maximum EV.

I sometimes (but not always) use it car parks, basically if I want to use ramps between levels without the ICE coming on.

 

Koi, it's really not much of a gimmick- it's extremely useful when used in the right context. Using the EV to accelerate beyond, say, 5 to 10 mph is not where it is most effective. It uses too much energy.

Now, some might argue that it's more being able to turn the engine off and not use fuel that is really the gas-saving technology of the Prius (in town), and they might be right, to a certain extent.

But if you use the EV in a pulse and glide method- i.e., get up to speed with the ICE, then let off the accelerator enough to shut off the engine, but not start reclaiming energy from the wheels- you can rack up huge mpg very quickly. I usually use a modified pulse and glide, where I get up to speed fairly quickly using a decent amount of power from the ICE so I can shut off the engine in a shorter amount of time (prevents wasting energy maintaining engine speed), then use as little EV as possible (like a sliver, or none at all on a slight decline) to maintain an acceptable speed as long as possible. The idea is to not use too much energy from the battery (because it will eventually have to be replaced one way or another, possibly by the engine and it's not very efficient to throw in an extra energy transfer), but still leave the engine off as long as you can while getting to where you need to go and racking up distance. The EV allows you to maintain your speed longer and go farther without turning the engine back on.

 

Yeah, I'm not criticizing driving with an attempt to say in the EV range of the energy-use meter, but what bothers me is that if I depress the EV button indicating to the car my preference to drive EV, that by just barely accelerating faster than the car would like, it kicks *OFF* the EV button.

That, IMO, is a gimmick of a "feature". What would have made sense to me would be a mode that would force the car to stay EV... and only drive as fast/quickly as EV only would be able to muster.... since the driver is purposefully desiring to drive in all-EV (what the button would seem to be for). In an *emergency*, fully depressing the accelerator naturally could kick off EV mode and let the driver zoom away on IC power. But if the driver has indicated they want to drive all EV... then I'd rather the car just do that rather than making it some sort of guessing game with how quickly/slowly to accelerate to keep the car from kicking off the setting.

In dangerously low battery situations the EV mode could also disable... so a driver trying to go "all electric" couldn't completely drain their battery and hurt battery life.

 

Almost all of these will be behavioral changes in the driver. For car hardware, engine block heaters, grill blocking and safe tire pressure increases will be most effective.

 

EV mode. It is what it is. Don't ask it to do stuff it isn't designed to do and nobody will get disappointed.

It's just a mode, not the whole enchilada.

 

It is what it is. Virtually useless. What I don't understand is why you get kicked out of EV mode (the button) way sooner than the ICE comes on in normal mode. I agree that it seems unusably crippled.

 

Just a FYI a roof rack will decrease MPG. The C gets better mileage in City driving than other models. It's highway MPG is still impressive.

 

I use EV mode to get up the hill near my house. It's a small hill, but beats revving up it like I had to in my old cars. Other than that, I never use it.

 

I never use EV mode. I even wish the C didn't have ANY mode.

 

The EV Mode button is not for driving around town in. If you expect that of it, then yes, you will find it useless. That's just not its purpose and this is not a PiP.

If you understand it as the tool that it is, then you might use it occasionally or even daily (as I do, most days). Or you might not... it depends on if you have the need for it or not.