EV-only goes from 7 battery bars to 2 in 1.5 miles. Normal?

In cold weather the need for heat inside the car will always turn the ICE on. Once the Prius is started it will never let the engine get cold because of pollution, it's a green car.
Two bars seems about right to cause the ICE to restart.

 

No, your battery sounds perfectly healthy. Keep in mind it's a tiny little pack and is only intended to provide torque for the simulated Atkinson cycle engine which produces very little on it's own. Your observation of rate of charge drop is correct and explained here:

Yes, indeed. This is precisely when the gas engine fires. The car will keep the battery state-of-charge between ~40-80% despite a drivers best efforts to do otherwise.

 

you're driving the car all wrong, and it's killing your mpg's. it is not an ev, it is a hybrid.

just drive it. and if you want to improve mpg's, youtube 'pulse and glide'

 

and killing the battery too.

 

Once the ICE is started, if you stop and the engine shuts down over a period of time the engine will restart without the HV battery needing recharged because a cold engine pollutes the air. Cold engines run rich, meaning a fuel to air ration above stoichiometric 14.7 : 1 and are a big source of pollution.

Air–fuel ratio - Wikipedia

 

It has a relatively small battery and really was NOT designed to run very far on battery alone.......especially not when cold and the battery capacity is slightly reduced.

I am lucky to get a couple of hundred yards on my C.......and even to do that I must drive in an impractical manner.

 

With the cold snap the last few days, I've found the less cabin heat demand, the faster it warms up, and the sooner it'll shut down at red lights. Setting cabin temp to 18C (as low as it'll go in centigrade), and shutting it right off at stops, I get engine shut down within a few blocks. Helps that I'm using a block heater too, for a couple of hours before setting off.

Try to keep your hybrid battery above half when possible, use the engine and battery, recoup charge whenever there's a slowdown, coast and charge.

 

No, this is not normal, it is exceptionally good! Toyota never suggested that it would go over a mile this way.

Remember that is is not a true EV car, it is really a gasoline powered car, the hybrid electric part helps with efficiency.

Don't try to drive it as an EV-only this way very much, as this puts excessive cycles on the battery and is not how this car gets its best fuel economy.

Yes, this is where the ICE is normally forced on to prevent a too-low battery.

 

Yes, to sneak home. Or to sneak away. Or to move the car around between garage and driveway spaces while bypassing that fuel-wasting cold engine warmup, though even this is fairly restricted.

Or, more honestly, because (1) customers were demanding it, (2) some drivers were adding it to their Gen2 anyway, so may as well put it on Gen3, and (3) there are some valid uses for it. But it isn't as useful as many neophytes and potential owners would hope.

 

I've found EV is never available with a stone-cold engine, which is about the only time I'd really want to use it, to avoid the engine firing up if I want to move the car a few feet, say out to the driveway. So yeah: never, lol.

For that cold-engine few-feet move:

Once you "ready" the car (one push of start button with foot on the brake), you have about 15 seconds until the engine fires up. If you want to avoid engine start up, always play it safe, count say to 10, then shut down. Repeat as needed.

Also, you can extend that 15 seconds indefinitely, if you (for example) shift to Reverse or Drive, get rolling, and then shift to Neutral, coast the rest of the distance to where you want to go. Only caveat: shut down the car by pushing the power button again; do not shift out of Neutral, or the car WILL fire up. Shutting down with the button will put it in Park properly.

The main object with all these shenanigans, is to avoid a short start up and shutdown. Short startups, without complete warm up, have a couple of possible consequences:

1. It's just generally rough on an engine, wastes gas.
2. Cold engine start up and nearly immediate shut down have been noted quite a few times here, as a possible precursor to bad cold-engine knock at a subsequent start up, say the next day.

 

Plenty of good advice already, @Reesmaxwell.

Here's some good reading. John's a regular here and has lots of excellent information. The page has a link to a well written pdf file that I found really educational.
John's Stuff - Toyota Prius User-Guide

 

Kind of.
In my C, it is worthless.

I think others have reported that the only situation where it is worth anything is if you are crawling along in a traffic jam at about 5 mph and can just let it creep along on electric without touching the gas pedal.
And that only works for a little bit, as you have found.
So in all the hybrid models, it really is almost worthless.

 

Best use I know if is if you just want to move the car a little ways without the engine going through its warm-up and wasting gas or else shutting it off cold, which isn't good for it. Like if you just want to move it out of the driveway for visitors or out of the garage to wash it.

 

I think I tried it a couple of times on my Gen 4 and it didn't come on the US model of Gen 2.

 

Jerry is plug-in, maybe different again?

 

Yes, plug-in is very different in the EV functionality. But I installed an EV button in my 2005 and it worked about the same as in a gen 3, just with less power on tap. There's so little EV range that it's only useful for moving the car to another place on your property or in the same parking lot. (European gen 2 actually had an EV button.) Unless you have a PiP or Prime, EV mode is not for going places; just for moving the car.

That said, if you're a few blocks from home and on like 25 mph streets and the battery is green or just fell out of green to blue, it's probably smart to go easy on the throttle and EV it the rest of the way home. I even do that sometimes in wifey's '07.

 

It probably worked even better than the Gen3 version, which is locked out when engine coolant temperature is below 20C / 68F in North America. In my climate, that lockout applies more than 350 mornings per year.

Foreign market units could work down to freezing, and I thought those who added the EV switch to their American Gen2s got the same.