Partial power reduction while accelerating onto highway

It's more than likely the low battery in the air conditioning on no matter what happens at other times when you run the car down to that low you can expect these kinds of things to go on if they don't you're lucky and that's about it. They should be happening when you're at one bar and the air conditioner doesn't matter whether it's on lower medium that's the fan speed the compressors turning it's on that's also using quite a bit of power voltage etc and then your car is old with almost 200,000 miles on it although mine doesn't do this with close to 300,000 mi but I also don't beat the hell out of it trying to get on the highway with one bar in the air conditioner flying away generally speaking. And I have noticed since I put the brand new Toyota Panasonic battery rack in it's not done any of this I drove it around about a year with a faltering battery playing all the games and all the nonsense trying to just patch it through and all that to no avail The minute the battery was changed the HV battery was back to a new card it's been that way for about a year now. So I know that when things like this start going on with most of these cars we're starting to get into batteries that are starting to falter whether we like to admit that or not that's basically what's happening and as soon as that's corrected you're back to not posting on here again and driving a lot least that's what I noticed.

 

The battery bar graph on the dash is essentially a zoomed-in view of the range between 40% and 80% state of charge for the battery, which is where the car likes to keep it. If you have Techstream or another scan tool watching the actual state of charge, you'll see the car likes to keep it spot on 60% most of the time, it will go down from there when helping you accelerate or climb hills, and it will go up from there when being charged, or on downhills or decelerating.

And you'll notice any time you are accelerating or hill climbing and the SoC drops below 40%, all the electric assistance you're getting immediately switches off, and it's suddenly just you, your 3,000+ pound car, and the 76 HP gasoline engine pulling it. And later on, once the state of charge is above 40% again, you'll have assistance again.

It's just what the car normally does. Getting down to 40% might happen more easily, more often with an old tired battery, but even with a shiny new one, the same thing will happen any time it goes below 40%.

 

As stated, what you experienced is normal when the HV battery SOC is low. And having low SOC is "normal" if for instance you are driving in stop and go traffic (esp with A/C on).

The car tries to maintain about 6 bars on the MFD when driving. When the car isn't really moving (& can't do much regenerative braking) then it will run the engine (at 1 bar) only enough to charge up to 2 bars. Ask for lots of motor assist right then and the car can only give a little bit before the SOC is too low.

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

You don't seem to understand the lack of power implications of one battery bar.

And demanding max power with one bar and then going WOT on the gas pedal all the time really beats the engine up. Your aware of how hard this is on the engine right?