I posted a little bit of the info in my introductory post. Basically, I bought a 2026 Nightshade plugin and got excited when I heard that the plugin had the charge mode option to force the engine to charge the battery. I understand its not efficient but great for people camping or doing hwy stuff and wanting to have a charge to do city driving(especially in the EU that have no ICE areas). I came here and looked but no one was really talking about it. So far it looks like its been completely removed and Toyota care says they dont know anything about it and cant find anything on the car manual. Amazing they seem not only to know nothing about it, but is unable to find out. Pretty sad.. Either way if people know a tech maybe there might be a way to enable it back again (holding down the ev/hv button for 5 sec). I just dont get why they would remove that in a mid cycle.
Are you sure it's not reaching max charge? Once the battery reaches "sufficient charged" which is 80% it cancels charge mode and goes in to HV mode. You can't use it if the battery is >= 80% anything above that you need to plug it in.
It was discussed on this thread a week or two ago: Sold My 2024 Prime | PriusChat The removal is only in North American cars - still there in Europe and Japan. That makes me suspect it might be a regulatory thing, but I don't know what. If so, that might make it unlikely there's a way of resurrecting it. One guess is that the change to 0W8 oil has prompted fuel economy rerating, and maybe there's been some new US or Canada rule about inefficient drive modes in the last couple of years. I can't say I feel like it's much of a loss though - the only real use case is "driver error" - failing to have used HV mode when you should have. In your scenarios of "people camping" or "wanting to have a charge to do city driving", you should have used HV mode to keep the wall charge until you needed it, rather than discharging so you end up having to use charge mode afterwards.
