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Jerry's Evolving Thoughts on "new-to-me" Prime Premium

Discussion in 'Prime Main Forum (2017-2022)' started by jerrymildred, Mar 12, 2019.

  1. jerrymildred

    jerrymildred Senior Member

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    There are a ton of threads about 12V batteries dying after not being driven for a week or two. Here's mine after we got back from a 16-day trip. I last drove it on Oct. 7. I popped the hood that night so I wouldn't have to open a door to check the battery voltage when we got home. Here's what it read this morning. I didn't do anything special.
    IMG_2622.jpg
     
  2. Salamander_King

    Salamander_King Senior Member

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    Do you have the voltage before you left? It seems to agree with the voltage reading @vvillovv is seeing on his PP 12v Battery Is Discharging, Re-Charge Now ! | Page 17 | PriusChat. Maybe 12v is all you need to start the car. The question is, is it OK to let the 12v discharge down below 12.4volt for the longevity of the battery? I don't know, but I am keep charging the 12v battery whenever the voltage goes down below 12.4v.
     
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  3. jerrymildred

    jerrymildred Senior Member

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    No, I forgot to check it. But it normally is fully charged after coming home from work.

    I just put the charger on it at 2A, so I'll let it fill back up even though I'm sure the car would have started fine. I noticed, when I opened the driver's door before connecting the charger that the brake pump ran at least twice as long as usual.
     
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  4. vvillovv

    vvillovv Senior Member

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    Yesterday morning is was around 32 F and the my battery was in the high 11's. I started the car and put it in HV and the ICE fired up right away. Than the read was 14.5 or something like that.
    Three days ago is was in the low 80's F and the battery was at 12.35
    I'm gonna keep a closer eye on it as the weather turns.
     
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  5. jerrymildred

    jerrymildred Senior Member

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    I'm glad I put the charger on the 12V Saturday morning. We came home with some kind of bug Friday night and still haven't left the house. I'm feeling good enough to work from home at least part time today. If all goes well, I think I'll be back to the routine tomorrow.
     
  6. phlack

    phlack Junior Member

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    I'll agree. After driving with no A/C for a while slowly, my miles/kWh are higher. 45 mph seems to be the point where it's the same with windows up vs windows down.
     
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  7. jerrymildred

    jerrymildred Senior Member

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    That's the speed I've usually seen mentioned. But there's a big difference in noise level, so I go with quiet. After 22 years of making aluminum cans in one of the loudest work environments in the world, I've had enough noise. :D

    The general rule of thumb I see mentioned often here on PC regarding cabin temperature is that if you keep yourself comfortable, the traction battery will thank you. Heat is not good for them.
     
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  8. jerrymildred

    jerrymildred Senior Member

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    Nothing special. Just a pretty morning after a rare night spent outside. We had fog overnight and it looked amazing on the freshly washed & waxed hypersonic red.

    IMG_2716.jpg

    IMG_2715.jpg
     
  9. Salamander_King

    Salamander_King Senior Member

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    Wow! Amazing beads of water droplets. I really had an intention to give my very first hand-wax job onto my PP. Had bought all the supplies and equipment, even an orbital polisher. But I got lazy... I let the time pass... No wash, No wax, No polish. Yap, the opportunity missed. The garden hose is frozen solid now. No way I can hand wash my car until next spring. :cry::cry::cry:
     
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  10. jerrymildred

    jerrymildred Senior Member

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    Yeah, I whine about the love bugs here, but I'm glad my garden hose doesn't freeze. LOL!

    I'm too lazy to wax the old fashioned way. I use that Turtle Wax stuff you spray onto a wet car and then dry it. Seems good enough for me. And now that I think of it, it was my wife's car that I just waxed on Saturday. I waxed this one several weeks ago. Saturday I just rinsed off the dirt spots on this one from a recent sprinkle of rain and then blew off the water with my leaf blower followed by a final drying with a towel. The wife's car took serious front end bug cleaning plus a fresh coat of wax.
     
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  11. Tideland Prius

    Tideland Prius Moderator of the North
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    It sure does! Love Hypersonic Red.

    That reflection from water is amazing.

    CFF15A5A-08ED-44B3-A3E3-3C624F725CBA.jpeg
     
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  12. jerrymildred

    jerrymildred Senior Member

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    Also, the sun does amazing stuff to it. In the shade, it's just another red car. But in the sunlight, it takes on a whole new personality.
     
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  13. huskers

    huskers Senior Member

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    The 1st time I encountered Love Bugs was in Louisiana when I was helping with Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. Those things were everywhere and like glue on windshields/car body paint. They don't seem to bite. They just get all over things.
     
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  14. jerrymildred

    jerrymildred Senior Member

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    I hate love bugs almost worse than anything. Sometimes here they get so thick that you don't dare open your mouth outside. And driving is like driving in a black snowstorm.

    We digress (again, but who cares?) but several of us from our church went to MS and AL to help a few times after Katrina. What a mess!!!
     
  15. OptimalPrime

    OptimalPrime Member

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    Agreed. I bought my 2017 at age 60, and now at 63, I think I'd have loved these headlights at any age. They make the HIDs in my Gen 2, which were my best headlights previously, seem like the $5 incandescent sealed beams in my car in college, a 1970 Maverick. The high beams on the Prime are suitable for upgrading the abduction beam on a UFO.

    The downside is that the cutoff line between extreme brightness and extreme darkness with the low beams, is an unusually sharp line. I'd prefer SOME usable lighting above it, and I'm not going to scuff up the spectacular lenses to get that.

    I had to iteratively adjust and test the low beams (a Phillips screwdriver turns the adjustment gear directly, like a drill chuck key) to get the perfect cutoff height for problematic parts of my local travels where very slightly convex stretches of road (including a bridge where the road coming home crossed an interstate with a wide median) would blind oncoming traffic for longer than I was comfortable with. For the brief stretches at the tops of hills where some blinding is unavoidable with any car, that's one thing. There is no perfect answer of how high or low to aim them for the general case of unknown terrain, but my locally-tested answer of what worked best, seems to be pretty good in general elsewhere. The low beams did have the ability to blind people for long stretches of some roads in my own town, as delivered by Toyota, and I found that unacceptably anti-social. Not to mention dangerous, seeing as I'd like them to be able to see well enough not to drive into me head-on.. I aim my passenger side headlight a tiny smidge higher than the driver's side, to give me a little more visibility of signs, cross traffic, deer, etc. .
     
  16. jerrymildred

    jerrymildred Senior Member

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    Spot on, @OptimalPrime. Pretty close to my observations and experiences. The difference is that mine already had over 23k miles on it when I got it. I suspect that someone may have already adjusted the headlights a little bit. Whether or not they did, I've only been flashed twice in almost two years and both were on the kinds of low crests you described.

    As for the sharp cutoff, I have mixed feelings. Like you, I think it might be nice sometimes to have a slightly more gradual edge to the top of the light beam. On the other hand, when I'm behind another car (which is probably 90% of the time when I drive around here day or night) I can see that crisp change from dark to light on the back of the car in front of me that happens just below their rear window.

    As for the high beams, the distance is amazing, but it would be nice if the beam was wider.

    Nevertheless, now that my wife has a regular Prius, the difference between them is radical. After years of driving Gen 2s with HID, she really likes her LED headlights on her 2017 Trim 2, but coming home from Ohio at night in October when we took her car, I was really wishing for the Prime's headlights. Especially when the deer standing on the shoulder of the road flashed by at the last nano-second. That was a little scary. I think the Prime would have given me a couple seconds of warning in case it was a suicidal deer.
     
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  17. Sarge

    Sarge Senior Member

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    That’s a great line! :LOL::LOL:
     
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  18. DavidA

    DavidA Prius owner since July 2009

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    OK, I'll agree that the high beams on the Prius and Prime are pretty darn bright, but if you've ever been caught in a UFO's TRAPPER* beam, you would swear without reservation that there isn't much of a comparison. I mean, holy heck, even Oakley sunglasses won't protect your pupils from that. And your skin burns and hurts for a week afterwards.

    [​IMG]

    * TRansport Acceleration Pivot Particle Equilibrium Receiver
     
  19. OptimalPrime

    OptimalPrime Member

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    I keep going back to your reply just to watch the cool graphic.

    Hey, how did it get to be 7am? I was just driving down a lonely road a few minutes ago at 10pm.
     
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  20. jerrymildred

    jerrymildred Senior Member

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    Update on battery health:

    My 2017 is about to turn over 49k miles. I checked the day before yesterday after buying gas for the first time in 3,500+ miles and it took a little over 6,100 kWh to charge the battery from fully depleted. Here are my numbers since I started checking on it just over a year ago. They will vary due to variability of how far the car has dipped into the HV capacity. Note that yesterday was the highest I've ever recorded.
    Screen Shot 2021-02-22 at 8.08.55 AM.png
    The last tank was 8.71 gallons and I used 397 kWh of my own electricity, plus the free stuff at work. Cost per mile came to 1.94 cents. That's for 3,553 miles. Cost was higher than last time mostly due to gas being over 25% higher.

    Maintenance since the end of February last year is:
    wheel alignment
    brake fluid flush
    oil change w/filter
    new windshield wipers
     
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