New guy, many questions, some may seem dumb.

One battery. Need 20% or more to run in EV mode. Suggest you spend some spare time roaming here. That topic and others are discussed frequently.
Welcome to PriusChat.

 

Are you plugging your car in?

 

What tells you that you don't have battery capacity?

So always drive in EV. The engine will run when the computer wants it to run. There is no need to switch anything. Some of us can get a bit better fuel consumption by switching at certain times, but that's totally optional.

There is also a low temperature limit for EV operation. When the outside temps are too low, the engine will always run. That might be what's happening to you.

 

The battery (singular) will only be charged enough to use EV mode when you plug it in (there is a technique to use the gasoline engine to charge the battery, but let's not go into that here). If there is not enough charge in the battery, the car will operate in hybrid (HV) mode using the gasoline engine, like a regular Prius. Just to be confusing, when in HV mode, the dashboard display can behave like a regular Prius, showing the charge levels as used in HV mode. The gasoline engine is used to keep the charge somewhere in the 20% range. So if in HV mode it wants to keep the battery from (say) 18% to 21% of its total charge, then if it has 21% charge, it will display 100%, because that is the maximum it will go to in HV mode.

 

one battery, but a plug in portion and hybrid portion. if you don't plug in, you only get the hybrid portion which does not allow ev driving.
you can also use 'charge mode' while driving to charge the plug in portion.

 

Just to clarify, by "portion", we mean portion of the charge level. There are no physical "portions" of the battery. When the charge level falls to below about 20%, the hybrid control software just makes the car behave like a non-plugin Prius, and displays information as if it were a non-plugin Prius. The "portions" are a fiction created by the software.

 

it's complicated

 

OK, I admit, I am now a bit confused. Is this about Prius Prime? Or is it about 2015 PIP, as your profile says? If it's about PIP, I am not familiar with the display, but if it's about PRIME, you should see very little battery charge on the icon if you have depleted your EV range. If you see a full battery level on dash of PRIME, then you must be able to drive on EV mode unless you are selecting out of it manually.

 

Hmm, pip doesn’t show percent, only miles