Not Charging Vehicle

1. No negative impact on the hybrid system, if you don't charge it, it is just like the Prius Hybrid. Your traction battery display will hover in the HV range (at the bottom of the scale), but otherwise it will drive like any other Prius Hybrid car.
2. You will suffer negative impact on MPG since you won't be using EV miles.

 

And if you want to gain some EV miles (at the expense of more gas), you can hold the EV/Hybrid button down until it switches to Charge mode. It's useful when on an open highway with a drained battery and getting close to enter a city so you don't pollute the city streets.

 

It will make your cost of operation much higher than most owners, but no issue with car's overall functioning in early years of ownership. Your best bet is to create a new lifestyle / work flow where your activities outside your place of residence revolve around parking at places that are least expensive to charge at and then delaying your return home as long as possible to max your charge up.

 

Unless you live in a part of the country where gas is cheaper than electricity

 

Yea... These are all the places I would like to live to get cheap gas:

 

Around here, gas is about $3.50
And keg’s are 40 cents.
So 50 miles is around $4.00 electric and $3.50 gas.
I have no idea what electricity costs in the above countries

 

How many kWH is the capacity of the battery? 8.8? So if it is totally dead and at peak cost time. $3.87

non peak $3.26 But that is if the battery is at 0 percent.

 

Buy a P3 International P4460 Kill-A-Watt EZ Energy Monitor, about $31 from walmart.com. Plug that into the wall, then plug your charger into the Kill-a-Watt. It'll display the kilowatt-hours you consumer. Multiply this number by the cost per kWh and you have the total.

 

Here gas is €1.90 per litre ($7,78 per gallon)
Electricity is €0.25 per kWh (but my Aldi next door offers free charge to customers).

So I try to use as much eletricity as possible.

 

If you have paired your cell phone to the car you can use the "TOYOTA" app to tell you how much energy is being used each time it's charged. My 2024 Prius Prime only lets you use from a 30% SOC to 100% SOC when you are driving in EV mode. The last 30% is reserved for the car's use when in HEV mode.

The picture shows my recent charging. I set the schedule to charge from 12:05 am (right after midnight) to 3 PM. This covers the lowest cost charging for PGE. On march 16 I returned home from a 500 mile drive with Zero miles of EV range showing on the display. It was in the late afternoon that I plugged in the car. At 12:05 am it started charging and and you can see that it charged from 30% to 100% using 7.21 kWh from a level 2 charger. It took 3 hours and 24 minutes to complete that charge.

The next time I needed a charge was March 20th when it replenished 5% of the battery that had been used over the course of several days of running errands.

 

7.21 kWh for a full charge of Gen 5 Prime sounds low. considering there's a 12 kW pack. Comparing to Gen 4 Prime with an 8.9 kW pack that takes 6.3 - 6.6 kWh from the wall or public charger with a 15% (or so ) unused buffer at both top and bottom.
I wonder what the unused buffers look like in the Gen 5. Or what that 30% SOC in the app is really related to in terms of the hybrid / traction pack full charge voltage range, or full charge watts from the wall or public charger.
I don't want to second guess the app since it's probably going to be used by more Gen 5 owners than Gen 3 or 4, and it's good to know what it's screens are showing for you guys to compare with each other.

I'd hope that Gen 5 Prime accepts more than 7.21 hWh to fill the 12+ kW pack, but if Toyota has changed the charge dynamics that much and it not just the app showing it's own strange take on charging, it'd be good to understand why Toyota made that adjustment.

 

I can think of many reasons that the gen 5 would be designed to use 70% of the 12 kWh battery for EV range and 30% for the hybrid buffer.

First and foremost is the idea that people carefully watch the range that's available after charging. They start to get anxious when the range diminishes significantly without an explanation. You can hide the change in range by declaring that the first 7.21 kWh provided by the battery pack is the 70% reserved for EV range The rest of the capacity is declared to be the " 30% of capacity " that will be used for buffering the regenerated braking energy.

This works even better when no one knows exactly how much energy is stored in the battery pack. Many cell phone Li-Ion battery packs are now using a charging paradigm that only uses energy from 25% SOC to 80% SOC to minimize battery degradation.

I think (but have not checked) that a similar scheme is used by Tesla to allow them to declare a rebuilt battery as being at 100% usable even when the it's suffering from significant damage from overcharging. The 100% SOC is easily redefined just by starting out using only 90% of the battery capacity. All you need to do is to declare a fresh voltage as "100%" and you are off and running.

 

Just a followup:

I was trying to think of other similar situations that are common in car design.

My 2024 Prius Prim showed that it was out of gas by the time that I pulled into the gas station. I added a bit more than 8.5 gallons to the gas tank. And then it was full. The specs say that it's an 10 or 11 gallon tank.

I'd rather that it have a hidden reserve than the other way around.