Green bars don't appear when I brake anymore.

The green state of charge (SOC) bars (the upper two on my car) should not normally appear in city driving. The only time mine come on is on a mountain descent.

You should be concerned if the SOC starts varying wildly (five bars or more) during normal driving, and if you start hearing the battery cooling fan (vent on right side of back seat) come on during normal driving.

 

how long have you owned, how many miles? i only get green occasionally, and usually on the highway. same with purple.

 

honestly, i don't recall anyone getting green bars when they step on the brake, unless the battery icon is almost full.
maybe we're not understanding you. there are two purple bars at the bottom, 4 blue bars in the middle and two green at the top. most of the time, the battery should hover around 5-6 bars.

 

I only get green bars (usually only 7th) when doing a lot of loooong coasting to slow/stop for lights on the highway. It can happen around town with the right topography, but I would never describe it as "as soon as I hit the brakes" in either case.

It could be a sign of the battery ageing, but unless you get that graph rapidly cycling between purple and green over the course of a couple miles, I'd say you have plenty more miles before you are in trouble.

If you wanted to pre-emptively look after the battery, you could invest in the Prolong charger/discharger set up (available here in the PriusChat Shoppe.

Unless you get battery trouble codes (with corresponding dash lights), Toyota will say there is nothing wrong and to just keep driving as normal until you do.

 

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My Prius battery meter is pretty much always at either 6 bars (blue) or 7 bars (green). The bars tell you the battery's state of charge. When you use regenerative braking, you recover some energy and increase the battery charge. Sometimes that's enough to go from 6 bars to 7 bars and sometimes not. Just like sometimes if the battery is at 7 bars, accelerating can take it down to 6 bars. But that doesn't always happen either.

Bottom line: as long as the battery charge isn't getting down to 2 bars or bouncing between 2 and 6 bars every few minutes, everything is working fine. If you're not seeing green 7 bars as often as you used to see them, then you can coast longer before stopping to use the regenerative brakes and gain more battery charge if you want.

 

I think you can fairly safely put this down to the HV battery is not what it was when it was new. No need for any anxiety, it is a natural progression.

 

My best guess is that your hybrid battery lost a little charge since you didn't use it for a week - just enough to make it so you don't hit green bars every time you brake now. While you don't want to leave the car parked in one spot for months at a time, this was a very small and minor battery discharge that's common to NiMH batteries. No worries.

 

i think you're car was broken, and fixed itself. happy motoring!

 

Just to be clear my "coasts" to slow/stop involve using the brakes (very gently) to maximise regen, so I would agree with the "as I'm braking" because that is how it appears to me, some time as I'm braking I go from blue to green. The characterisation that you were seeing it turn green "as soon as I start braking" is what I don't see and was the point of my statement. The former is normal, the latter, not so much.