Electric only past middle line!

I was just up driving on Mulholland Drive and on the way down the SoC ended up being really high. Well, when I was down on flat roads I noticed that I could start from a light and push the HSI past the middle line and it would stay on electric only. I have to say I have never seen this behavior before. I can get about 1/3 of the way past the middle before the ICE kicks on. Neat!

 

It was a beautiful day here in LA, in the high 70's, so I had all the windows open and climate control totally turned off. (I think if I had turned it on I had it set for 72F. I'm not sure the temp setting affects things when the HVAC is off.)

As soon as I was one bar down from the very top, it was back to normal with the engine turning on right at the middle line.

But while it was doing it's thing, I was still seeing the "sticky" middle line, but I could go up about 33% past the middle before ICE would kick off! The first time it did it, I thought I was imagining it, so I tried a few more times and it was the same thing.

Acceleration before ICE kicked off was pretty good too, with me having no trouble with keeping up with traffic light to light.

While coming down the hill, the SoC never got high enough that the ICE came on to burn off excess power .. but I figured it would any moment as for the last part of coming down Laurel Canyon, the battery indicator was totally full and I was still using lots of regen.

Oh, I was in ECO mode, by the way. (The mode I always use.)

 

Interesting, I wonder what determines when it will allow this? If we only had the SoC and max charge/discharge settings working for the SGII. Clearly the Max power draw allowed by the Battery Smart Module/Hybrid ECU is higher at that moment, allowing you more than usual EV power.

During normal operation, is SoC is at two bars indicated, you get less power draw and torque from MG2 than it is when SoC is higher ... but clearly I was getting even more torque and power than usual today. Sadly, I didn't even have my SGII in the car, so I couldn't tell.

I need to figure out the max discharge and charge rates from the ECU -- it's not a multi-frame response so once the proper math and data is identified, it's possible we can get SGII gauges of it.

 

The Toyota PHEV Prius is supposed to do 60mph on EV only -- and I was wondering if Toyota changed the drivetrain in some way to accomplish this.... I was thinking the limitation in our Prius was the power reserve available to start the ICE, not a physical limitation due to MG1/MG2 speed, etc.

This max SoC mode should get a new name. As far as I can tell it was not in the Gen II car.

Hyper-EV?

 

Actuall that Gen II hack isn't pretty. It essentially tricks the car into thinking it is out of gas (a failure mode.) It either does it by sending commands or by cutting fuel.

We know now the Gen III does not have the out of gas mode, so that hack is not possible. But it seems we just need to keep the SOC high to go 50mph. That's cool!