Looking to Buy a 2002, good idea?

Generally speaking, if the battery charge seems to rapidly go from empty to full and back again and you’re regularly getting average fuel economy that’s below 30 mpg in winter or below 40 mpg in summer, it means your traction battery is having problems and is getting close to worn out. Another potential sign of a weak traction battery is poor performance when trying to go uphill. If that is happening as well, I would suspect that the traction battery is not doing well and could need to be replaced relatively soon (possibly in the next few months to a year).

 

Each car shown is a specific amount of energy recovered by regenerative braking. The more you drive downhill (using brakes) and in stop and go traffic, the more of those car icons you should see. If you’re driving on roughly flat surfaces at a constant speed, you won’t see any. The symbols don’t tell you much about the health of the traction battery. They just let you know the regenerative brakes are working properly.

 

Each little car symbol is worth 50 watt hours (not kilowatt hours! ) Any time your regen braking has recovered that much energy, a little car is shown. (I think you can also get half little cars, worth 25 Wh.)

For a sense of scale, 50 Wh is about the energy needed to raise a one-ton weight 66 feet up. (Or a 1000 kg weight 18 meters up, if that sounds better.)

50 kWh would be like a one-ton weight raised 12½ miles.* If you could recover that much energy in regen braking, we'd really want to know where you were driving!


* I'm treating g there as the same as at ground level. At 12½ miles that's probably lazy of me.