Uhhh...EV Mode mod always on? I'm scared!

It's amazing how often someone changes something on their car and suddenly the imagination goes wild. I always get at least 200 MPG on the first trip after I wash my car, and 300 if I polish as well. Just kiddin' ya

BTW. What's the max speed you can do before it kicks you out of EV mode?

 

Ok that sounds about right. Overuse of EV mode is not good for the battery health, so definitely use it sparingly.

We have an EV button that comes standard in the Australian model, so I don't know much about the aftermarket installed ones. But do you have an indicator on the dash to show it's in EV mode?

 

Ok that makes it a bit more difficult. What about looking to see if the engine is running on the MFD. Surely if the EV mode was on all the time then if you drove under 35MPH then the SOC would just continue to fall until it got down to 2 or 3 bars and kicked you out of EV mode.

BTW. Mine beeps just once going into and out of EV mode, except when it kicks me out (due to either too much speed or acceleration demand, or too little SOC) in which case it gives three short beeps.

 

I installed the mod and have not noticed it staying on. The only time I use it is to sneak out of a store parking lot down the road to a steep hill. At the bottom of the hill is a stop sign, I hold the cruise control switch for three seconds the engine starts and I pull out onto the road. I can get 2 miles of no gas battery charging after leaving the store. After that the car behaves normally, the engine shuts off as I do the pulse and glide hyper mile stuff with the no gas high speed glide, if the engine is warm of course.

 

Yeah it doesn't take long to realize that the EV mode has fairly limited usefulness. You definitely need to use it sparingly. Here's my list of when it is and isn't useful.

Useful.

- Moving prius a very short distance when cold. Particularly useful for "car shuffling", where you just need to move a car in or out of a driveway or garage.

- Arrival and exit of shopping center car park (if it's not too big). Normally the ICE will be off anyway under these conditions, but EV mode is useful to prevent inadvertent bump of pedal to trigger the ICE. Especially if you're only in hybrid stage 3.

- Force drop a bar of SOC before long decent. Sometimes you'd like burn off a little bit of battery charge before a long decent where you'll be doing a lot of regen. It's often difficult to be gentle enough on the gas to keep it in electric mode long enough to accomplish this without the EV mode switch.

- And last but definitely not least, to kill the dreaded "hybrid stage 3" endless (unless you stop) engine idle! I sometimes use it here to stop the engine idling while coasting up to traffic lights etc, then once stopped I disable EV and let it idle to "stage 4".


Not Useful (avoid).

- Delaying engine warmup. I know it can occasionally be useful for this, but be aware that using EV to delay engine warm up while you're traveling slowly to the end of your street or whatnot can be counterproductive. It can cause a lot more stress on both the engine and the battery when you're suddenly trying to accelerate onto a main road with a stone cold engine.

- Accelerating. Obviously when you use EV mode you sometime need to accelerate, but try to avoid using EV mode just for the sake of keeping the ICE off (and hence not seeing the low instantaneous MPG's that you get when accelerating under engine power). This is always counterproductive and a major noob mistake.

- Anytime in general driving when you're thinking of doing just for the heck of it (just to see that really cool 99.9MPG come up). Avoid unless it's immediately before good downhill regeneration section.