Caring for non frequently driven prius?

a few weeks is no big deal. after a few years, you may want to start throwing a trickle charger on the 12v.

 

Everything I've heard about hybrids is that they need to be driven regularly to keep the electrical power parts of the system from getting funky... Maybe you can make your car available to a family member with a good driving record? Or perhaps a neighbor?

 

The HV battery is ok for many months if stored with 4/5 blue bars on the MFD, but the 12v needs some TLC. A battery minder if stored indoors, a solar panel charger if stored outside should keep it healthy.

 

There are different schools of thought on this, in use the Prius system tries to keep the charge in the blue, and when not in use the battery will slowly self discharge. So you can argue that the higher the state of charge the longer it can be left, but with 4 or five bars you should be perfectly safe as the rate of discharge is very slow.

So to sum up, do not worry about the HV battery but look after the 12volt. If you leave the car for more than five or six weeks I would recommend blowing the tyres up to 45/50 PSI or better still lift the car to take the weight of them, this is to avoid flat spotting the tyres. The fronts are the most prone to this because of the extra weight carried there.

Hope this helps.

John.

 

I was a bit obsessed with keeping my bars green as often as possible for the first few months of learning to pulse and glide, or in my case pulse and regen... Then one day someone on here said the level of charge between green and blue is nothing but eye candy. That was enough to get me to learn more/re-evalute my driving habits. It got me to focus on real pulse and glide in city and pulse and stealth mode on highways. It earned me a couple few miles improvement in MPG too...

What I learned is:

--Heavy pulse and regen driving overuses the battery, possibly decreasing longevity

--Dropping my pulse acceleration from 70% of engine power down to 25% engine power seems to put way less load on battery

-- On certain hills in town I was able to get the battery to a full charge (80%) one or two times a day, which I liked because the electric part of the car has more power at max charge. Problem is this requires more electricity to run the battery cooling fan and even worse made me worry about battery cooling whenever I wanted to turn the car off at full charge...

-- Also during time that I'm at full charge I can no longer regen any of the available kinetic energy. Nowadays I always have more room in the batteries for all available regen opportunities.

--Now that I no longer care when I see the charge as low as 40% at times my previous battery problems with sudden drops in charge levels (3 or 4 bars) have seemed to go away.

 

does this help with infrequent use of your car?

 

nope... probably not, my ramble is related to something different but was inspired by the poster above me...