Regenerative power "cars" conversion to battery "bars"

It's not a simple conversion. Each car is a fixed amount of energy, but the battery bars are not. The battery bars have a non-linear relationship to charge, with the center bars representing more stored energy. Likewise there is some loss recharging the battery.

You could map it out on a bar by bar basis, but it wouldn't be worth the effort. It's probably better to use some crude rule of thumb.

Tom

 

Add to that it doesn't show 'negative' car symbols. When the car needs traction battery power, it just takes it without showing it in "car symbol" units. It also adds traction battery power as needed, again without showing it in "car symbol" units.

If you really want to do the mapping of "car symbol" to battery bars, there is a way but it is crude and ugly:

• at the top of a large hill or mountain, use EV mode on a flat road to run the battery as low as possible
• creep to a road that smoothly descends the mountain
• start the video recorder and wait for display to update
• let the car descend the mountain while the video camera runs
• at the bottom, pull over to the curb and wait for the display to update
• turn off the camera

This should give you "m" cars and "n" bars. With the change in altitude, we can calculate the change in potential energy, the maximum that could have been stored. Like I said, it is not an easy thing to do.

Is there some thing you'd like to use such data for?

Bob Wilson

 

You should only see them when you use the brakes.

Braking will always be bad for fuel economy. On a Prius, it simply is less worse than on other cars. Only brake when you absolutely need to and when you do have to use them, try to use a slow deceleration to maximize use of the regenerative system.