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.
It might be possible to get it back, by simply installing the switch with the hold function. The Gen2 didn't have EV mode when introduced to North America. Just installing the switch, or hack circuit, restored EV mode. Why risk messing with software when removing the input device accomplishes the task? As for why it's gone here, it could be for the same reason EV mode on the hybrid was excluded at first; to head of complaints of people who didn't read the manual and fully understand the mode.
You're the second person I've seen suggesting the magic is in the button. I'm a little baffled. Seems like an amusing proposition - rather than a simple switch and a single wire, and connect it to one of your ECUs, put some sort of microcontroller into the switch itself so that it can time how long you press it, and then use some sort of protocol to indicate what type of press it was. Do they do this for every button - they all have circuits that keep track of their "on" or "off" state, and send separate "on" and "off" indications to the computers? Or, you could just have a single wire and a push button that closes the circuit whenever it's pushed. That analogy doesn't work. That was a simple button that had been removed. There was no magic computer in it that made EV mode work - the ECU was always listening for a button press. If the EV button had been a complex thing that sent a special "EV mode" signal, you wouldn't have been able to fit a simple button... In this case, the simple button still exists - the input device hasn't been removed. But the ECU will have stopped looking for and taking action on long presses. Your plan here depends on the EV/HV button working totally differently to the Gen 2 EV Mode button.
That was likely me. If the only difference between the buttons is the label, that brings up the question I proposed in that thread. Did anyone with a new NA PHV hold down the EV/EHV button to see what happens? So sue me for not knowing there was no difference between the buttons.
