Whining, Whistling Sound from Motor

Yes. These are substantial electric motor/generators, so there will be some whine.

 

Hmm, I would have to say when my engine is running, I find the car pretty darn quite (outside). Heck, they are talking about adding a noise maker to the car. Certainly no louder than my Carmy.

I don't hear a whistling sound myself but hey, my hearing is not what it used to be.

 

I hate to say, read the manual, but it is in there

 

This is a common problem among the 2010's. Fortunately it is short lived and self-correcting. You see you have Jeremy Clarkson down in there doing some filming for his next Prius review. There's really no good way to force him out, but if you park in a quiet open place for a few nights, he'll leave by himself.

 

The inverter whine is quite a bit louder in the 2010 than in any
of the second-gen cars. No clue why, you'd think they'd have
engineered out some of that in the next rev..
.
_H*

 

I don't think of it as a problem, I am used to the sound.

When driving on a open road at highway speeds you don't hear it.

If your driving slowly between cars or narrow streets that are quiet you will tend to notice it more.

It sounds totally normal....I hear mine in my neighborhood on a quiet night rounding a turn etc...I know it's the electric motors...wish the whole thing was electric.

 

If you have ever worked around electric motors, this is exactly what they sound like. I like to hear this sound especially when the ICE is not running !

 

If Toyota engineers have a good sense of humor like Siemens, we'll hear a good melody.
Please listen 1:22 point on the following video.

Ken@Japan

 

Cool! But did that melody really come from the inverter?

 

I'm sure the sound came from the inverter.

Ken@Japan

 

Inverters doing their job...and you hear them because the switching frequencies at which they work to reconstruct an AC current wave is often less than 22khz.
More here.

 

Prius has a long history of eerie noises. In June 1997, engineers were road testing pre-production vehicles late at night. Rumors of ghosts started to circulate when people in the vicinity of the test track began to hear strange whining noises around midnight. As it turned out, the culprit wasn't ghosts but rather Prius inverters. The engineers decided they'd better reduce the noise level, although probably more for future owner satisfaction than fear of evil spirits. Gen 3 inverter noise may be creeping back to the haunted level.

 

I love the sound of electrical generation in the morning!

 

Yeah, the Prius makes all kinds of weird noises even when it isn't moving - the brake pump pre-pressurizing, some kind of venting in the back (gas tank? hybrid battery?), and so on. Then there's the whine of an electric generator at high rpms when the brakes are firmly applied.

Just sing in Russian and pretend your car is the Red October :thumb:

 

A regular car does not have an inverter.

Ken@Japan