My 2026 Plugin Prius Buyers Regret...

I don't think the Prius transaxle can actually do that- that is, generate enough power to significantly charge the PHEV battery while also driving at highway speed and holding the gas engine to a low RPM all at the same time.

Engine noise during acceleration and hill climbing was always part of the Prius experience. I don't think I would have expected that to go away when they added part-time EV capability to the PHEV model.

Though, I can see where it's a sharper contrast in sound when the PHEV model allows more of your total driving to be done in the quiet EV mode.

Also there's a bit of a "well there's your problem" statement to be made if you aren't regularly plugging the thing in- I don't mean that to be a cheap shot gotcha. But if you paid for that capability, why not take advantage of it?

 

At highway cruise speed, the constantly-running engine is in its efficiency zone - doing more work to fill the battery to use the charge later is a net loss - charge/discharge losses mean you're burning more fuel to fill the battery than it would have cost you to use hybrid mode later.

Battery filling by choice only makes sense efficiency-wise when you would otherwise be running the engine significantly below peak efficiency, so the efficiency gain from taking more engine power outweighs electric charge/discharge losses. .

At low speed, a constantly-running low-loaded engine would be inefficient, so it does make sense to alternate between charging the battery and stopping the engine and using charge - that's the standard hybrid operation.

The speeds where OP would like to use EV are the speeds where you could be slowly building up charge efficiently. With a bigger battery you could run the standard hybrid algorithm on a bigger timescale - rather than alternating once or twice a minute while in town, you could alternate every few hours of driving. But it still wouldn't make sense (efficiency-wise) to fill it up while highway cruising.

So the car doesn't do what OP wants - the aim is to be an efficient hybrid with plug-in ability, not a fuel-powered EV.

New regulations are the reason the Charge mode button went away in America - new CARB rules required that emission measurements are done in the most polluting user-selectable drive mode, which would have meant testing in Charge mode. Charge mode remains available outside North America.

So elsewhere you do retain the option to spend fuel now to avoid running the engine later, but it's not generally the smartest thing to do - if you want to run EV later, you should have filled from wall charge, and be running hybrid now to save charge to run EV later.