Battery capacity indicater question

If you are talking about the little green cars, then yes, they may only be sporadic. It represents the energy recaptured by the regenerative braking. You won't get them all the time. On the interstate you won't get many if any at all. In the city you should get a few more, but it does require braking to get them, so the more you do the more icons you see. If your city driving is realtively congestion free, you may still see very few.

 

The little leaf car icons indicate how much energy has been recovered (and sent to the battery) during deceleration thanks to the regenerative braking.

If you get them, it's kind of good because it's showing you've recovered energy that a normal car would have lost by normal braking, but it's also kind of bad, because ideally you'd never brake, and keep up your momentum.

That particular picture in the manual is rather far-fetched, and clearly fake. Unless you're driving in a really hilly area, you'd be unlikely to ever see 3 leaf cars per 5-minute bar, and on flat terrain, probably never more than 1 or 2. On freeways, you'd normally see none.

The leaf cars don't include the normal battery charging that happens while driving, so they don't directly tell you much about the state of the battery - that's shown on the separate "Energy" screen. One leaf car is roughly equal to 3/4 of a bar on that screen (although it's not clear cut, as the bars there aren't totally linear).

Don't worry, there's nothing wrong with your car.

 

The *fewer* regen-cars you see, the better you're doing overall.
I have no idea why Toyota set it up like this little video game
that encourages people to try stackin' the things up. But really,
if you're capturing a lot of energy via regen braking then because
of various conversion inefficiencies you've actually got that much
*less* to feed back out to the wheels. It would have been better
to let speed bleed away naturally, as it would whether you had regen
braking or not ... but since terrain and surrounding traffic don't
allow for that most of the time, regen is there to help.
.
In case anyone hadn't seen some earlier posts, each little green
car is the equivalent energy of someone pushing the unpowered car
around in a parking lot fairly hard for about 12 minutes. This is
based on a fairly in-shape human being able to produce about a third
of a horsepower [250 watts] just under the threshold of becoming
overly tired, and a green car is a fifth of doing that for an hour.
Four times that [i.e. stacking up four green cars] gets you about
one free mile under ideal conditions at low speed.
.
_H*

 

I believe the "official" definition of each green car is the amount of energy needed to light a 50W lightbulb for one hour.

 

True, but a lot of people don't have any real-life feel for how
much energy *that* is, either. Putting it in terms of how long and
how hard they'd have to pedal the "generator bicycle" helps sometimes.
.
_H*

 

I'm curious about the other battery capacity indicator....the one with the blue bars in the 2006 model...i get bars most of the way up, but never the last couple. anyone know if that is normal?

 

Yeah, you'll never get the last couple, because then the bars turn green. It sounds like it's doing a good job keeping it optimally charged. I'd guess you don't live in a very hilly area.

 

Coming down a big hill or mountain while braking will fill them completely to the top.... once you get to the bottom of the hill where you require power again, you may even see that you can go into EV mode breifly as they bleed back down even though you may still be at relative high speeds of 50 or 60+ mph.

There is a discussion about that issue here... http://priuschat.com/I-ran-in-ev-mode-goin...mph-t16030.html

 

When you are going down a long hill and the battry level becomes at the top of 8, the ICE starts to throw the energy away to protect the battery not to exceed the 80% SOC.
In this situation, an EV mode switch (non-standard in the US models) can't be activeted and the ICE continues to spin.

Ken@Japan

 

Now I haven't tried that!.. my EV switch will not manually activate at speeds faster than 34 mph, are you saying it may activate at faster speeds if I acheive the 8th green bar?

Maybe you have a different EV switch possiblities where you are at or are they all programmed the same?

 

Faster than 34 mph, you can't activate the EV switch.
http://priuschat.com/index.php?showtopic=14582&hl=
The program between JP and UK model are same.
However, the battery level 8 behavior is not documented.

Ken@Japan