Spinning out Front Wheels - What to do ?

The car protects itself; it won't let you spin long enough or fast enough to damage the drivetrain.

How old are your tires? Have you checked the tread depth? People talk about the top of Lincoln's head as the absolute minimum, but they have usually lost a lot of grip already by then, partly because of loss of tread depth and partly because of changes to the rubber.

Back in the spring I measured my tires at about 5/32", and figured I would probably want to replace them before this winter. A week or so ago in a light rain, I did notice an easy spin when leaving a stoplight, and just took that as my reminder to pull the trigger, so the new tires are on now.

-Chap

 

Yeah traction tends to degrade gradually as tread depth goes down, 4/32" is a sensible minimum. The Michelin Premier's are supposed to be good in that regard, maintain tread gaps all the way down.

 

Get some Michelin Pilot Super Sports to put on there and your traction problems will end (in the dry)

 

are you in eco mode?

 

Traction control and or ABS usually kicks in also when wheel slip is detected.

 

I have a 2010 that I can spin the tires(wet) at will! I have to really baby it to get moving in snow because of wheel spin.
Very little traction control. I had a 08 that was terrible when wet or snow. T.C. and engine decelerating made it impossible to drive in slippery conditions!!

 

"Sounded worse than any other second in this car."

I'm sorry, but I had to laugh when I saw that. It's the worse sound I ever heard, too! BANG! That's what it sounded like in my 2016 Prius. I though I just destroyed the transmission in my brand new car. I thought I would see gears and parts laying in the street. I'm still not sure what caused the bang.

But I was on a wet street.... You spun the wheels on a DRY road? How did you do that?

Ok guys, what's the REAL TRUTH... Assume you have good tires. Does the Prius suck on wet roads, rain, snow, slippery conditions? Is there too much torque? What is causing all this wheel spin? Do we have to baby this car when starting out from a stop? Would it be better to turn the Traction Control off?

I never spun the wheels in any other car I owned. (Front wheel drive, or rear wheel drive.) What's up with this Prius?! And what the hell caused that BANG???

 

Also check suspension components.

 

....then kinda floor it in PWR mode.

Feel the PWR!

PriusNeckBeard, does your 2013 Prius have Traction Control? And is it on?

That's a good feature. I've never has Traction Control before. But I could sure do without the BANG.

 

I have a friend that owns a Prius and works at the dealer. He turned his traction control off and melted a brand new set of tires. His car is fine so I doubt you did any damage

 

I chirp the tires on either my 2004 or my 2010 every morning going out of my neighborhood to work. The intersection at the end of my street is on an upgrade, and the visibility of on-coming traffic stinks in both directions. I punch the throttle to get going as quickly as I can, causing the chirping in both cars. The tires are never free-spinning which would cause the ABS to kick in. However, I am taking the tires on both cars to the very limit of their traction to get out of the intersection. This even occurs when the tires are new. The 2010 is always in Eco mode, but that doesn't matter at full throttle.

Also note that I am punching the accelerator nearly a full second before the churping starts, which means that it is the traction motor kicking in causing the chirping and not the ICE. I have also discovered if you let off of the throttle a little bit at the first chirp you can extend the time of the chirping.

Actually, it's kind-of fun. I can't wait to do it with the Firebrid...

Bill the Engineer

 

I was wondering if I have too much air (40 psi) in my Toyo tires. Or maybe they are just not good rain tires?
We get very little wet weather here in Southern California, but I would still like to have a good, all-season tire.

The wheel-spin was a learning experience. Still not sure what caused the traction loss. Even at low speeds, and a normal/smooth push on the gas pedal caused my car to slip. Sure, it was a wet street. But does the Gen4 have THAT much torque? I'm not going to use the PWR mode anymore. Process of elimination... I'll start with that, and see what happens in Eco and Normal mode.

 

I have spun the tires for a split second in PWR mode in my gen 3. It is jarring because you just don't expect it from a Prius. PWR mode (according to my scan gauge) delivers a brief, say a second or less, shot of power to the drivetrain sometimes in excess of 100 amps while the engine is spinning up when the pedal is mashed hard. That's why power mode makes it feel way quicker. I have not observed that power surge in the other modes. It could be there if you hit the pedal enough but I suspect it's not because in the other modes the car modulates that out, especially in ECO, to remain smooth. 100+ amps to the wheel from 0 will give you wheel spin, especially if the steering wheel is turned at all. If you give it a smaller jolt, say 60-70 amps, by not pressing the pedal so hard it does feel quick though, which is kind of fun.

One other thing, it only seems to be able to deliver a heavy load every so often, not every few seconds if you keep hitting it. Also, this goes away at very low charge levels for the battery.

 

maybe eco mode pedal travel would help prevent overpowering the wheels.

 

In general, when you want to learn something about how your Prius works, your #1 go-to source is what's called the New Car Features Manual on techinfo.

As for the story with traction control, well:

If you have a Prius, you have traction control, and it's on. There's a way to turn it off temporarily, but only intended for certain service procedures, not for driving. The version in Gen 1 barely deserves the name "traction control", but it has been genuine traction control in every generation since.

This is like several other Prius features (the electric power steering, the electric coolant pump that keeps the cabin heat going when the engine's off, etc.) that Toyota was forced to provide just by the nature of the car they were building, but also turns out to be a nice feature. In this case, they were forced to provide it because (a) high electric motor torques could easily spin wheels, if traction breaks, to high speeds faster than a human driver can react, and (b) the rotor of MG1 has limits to the centrifugal forces it can withstand. So they needed an automatic feature to protect the drivetrain. (The anecdotal fact that Neohippy's friend, in the video above, deliberately turned the control off, tried to frag his drivetrain, and happened to fail, does not prove Toyota engineers wrong about their calculated limits.)

In the Generation 1 Prius, that was really all the "traction control" was: a safety that would cut output power, faster than you could react, if the wheels began to spin. The marketing department went ahead and called it "traction control" but it never really did much to help you up a snowy road.

In Gen 2 and every generation since, it has been an actual traction control, that not only has control of output power, but can also detect which wheel has less traction and selectively brake it, so that more useful torque reaches the other one. It still has its protective function of not letting you overrev the MG, but it is also more useful for actually driving in poor traction.

For more details, see this post here. It has part of the explanation, and a graph of its behavior, from the 2004 New Car Features Manual, and also a youtube video showing a drive up a slick snowy incline, where the driver just drove the way the car was designed for (holding a steady input on the go pedal, just as the graph shows) and the car slowly, steadily traction-controlled its way up the hill.

It's one of the best examples I've ever seen of a physical demonstration video showing exactly what a graph on paper shows.

Youtube is also replete with other videos about Prius traction control, usually posted by people who wanted it to work some other way, and posting videos to show it doesn't.

Also fun, if you haven't discovered this yet, is you can connect with Techstream, interrogate the skid computer, and see the last four (IIRC) times you chirped, how fast you were going, what the accel/decel and yaw rates were, instantaneous torques and wheel speeds.

-Chap

 

Punching the gas can be hard on the inverter. This was behind a third gen recall, which revised the software to make the accel ramp up more gradually. Still, best avoided for a lot of reasons.