Hello prius owners! Have a question for you.

These vehicles do like to be driven. And by "like" I mean you can avoid most or all of the battery charge and fuel system deposit problems by putting regular miles on it. One thing going for you is the newness of the vehicle. I would at the least recommend a periodic 12V battery conditioning with a suitable maintainer. Something you could rig up for a couple hours to run a conditioning cycle or two. Not sure, but maybe the 2017 has the 12V battery back in the engine compartment and it is a larger battery? In that case, battery maintenance might not be as important.

 

welcome!
it is in front, but they are still having failures. if you can't drive it more than an hour, you should disconnect the 12v negative while your gone. if you don't want to do that, at least shut off the sks.
otherwise, you will probably come home to a dead battery at some point.

all the best!

 

Storage unit? Is it one of those metal ones? How hot does it get in the summer inside your storage unit?

 

If you are driving it once a week I don't think you would need to disconnect the 12v battery. The 12 v does not do much when the car is sitting and is not used to operate what you would call the starter motor on a regular car. Bisco is correct that if you have SKS and you can turn it off you should do so during the week it sits. Just use your key fob to unlock and lock the doors, then turn it back on for the day you drive it. Mechanically there should be no problem for a car to be only driven once a week. How the car is driven for that 1 hour a week might be helpful though. 2-30 minute highway drives? 6 -10 minute short hops? I would run the gas tank down to 1/4 before I refilled it. The tank has a plastic bladder and cant rust like old metal gas tanks. That way you put fresh gas in rather than just topping off old gas.

As far as the traction battery life there is at least 1 member here who designs battery packs for a living. They would be the ones to listen too about that.

 

Unlike earlier generations, the Gen 4 Prius does not have a switch to turn off the Smart Key System. According to the Owners Manual (Page 177),

The battery-saving function will be activated in order to prevent the electronic
key battery and the 12-volt battery from being discharged while the vehicle is
not in operation for a long time.
●In the following situations, the smart key system may take some time to
unlock the doors.
• The electronic key has been left in an area of approximately 6 ft. (2 m) of
the outside of the vehicle for 10 minutes or longer.
• The smart key system has not been used for 5 days or longer.

This implies that the smart key system powers down into a "sleep" state after 10 minutes of inactivity and turns itself off after 5 days. If this is not sufficient to keep your 12V battery from discharging, I guess your only alternative is to turn the SKS off completely using the vehicle's customization features described on Pages 748 through 751 of the Owners Manual, and only use the remote or mechanical key to unlock the car.

 

The 10 minutes is if the key is outside of the car but within 6 feet of it. Like you dropped the key on the ground getting out of the car. So you can still turn it off but it's not as easy as pushing a switch then?

 

I wouldn't worry about it and get on with my life.
Is it still under warranty?

 

I'm not sure why 6 feet and 10 minutes is significant. The prior page in the manual says the SKS will only operate if the electronic key is within 2.3 feet of the driver's door handle. I was guessing that the SKS wakes up (cabin lights turn on, etc.) when the key passes within 6 feet of the outside of the vehicle, but then goes back to sleep if the car is not unlocked within 10 minutes. The situation you describe would probably result in the SKS becoming inoperable, since 2.3 feet is less than the distance from the door handle to the ground.

The customization section of the Owners Manual is not clear as to who will be able to disable the SKS system. I believe I read elsewhere that the higher end version of Entune allows the user to customize features such as this, but the lower end versions do not offer this capability, meaning customization would require a trip to the dealer or perhaps a Carista device.

 

So, once a month pull up to your house and trickle charge with a 2 amp trickle charger the 12v for 12+ hours to charge it up, and continue using it weekly to keep the traction battery cycling, the 12v takes a long road trip to charge.

 

If this is not possible and your storage unit has some sun exposure, you could get a couple of 1.5 watt solar panels from Harbor Freight and put them on the roof of your storage unit to charge your battery. This is what we do with our Gen 4, since it is not used much while our Gen 2 refuses to give up the ghost. I've been told that unless the solar panels produce more the 5 watts or so, you won't have to worry about overcharging your battery. I found that only one of the 1.5 watt panels was not enough to keep our 12V in a full state of charge. Concerning the HV battery, the warranty for it is only voided if you do not power up the car for a period of 60 days. That doesn't mean you aren't better off running it more often, of course, but when the battery is new, you won't have to worry as much about it as when it gets older. We power our car up no more than every couple of weeks, which is not ideal, but to do it more frequently would just be a waste of gas, since we don't drive much anymore and the Gen 2 battery really needs to get its exercise.