Two questions about them thar hills...

OK.....time to pause a bit and reflect.
This is the PRIUS C sub-forum......and the initial discussion was about the C.

Now we seem to have drifted over to the Gen 3 regular Prius.

While that video is indeed interesting, does it really apply to the C.......the basic design of which has changed little or none since it's introduction ??

 

The c was introduced around the mid-cycle refresh of Gen 3. Aside from still using the smaller, 1NZ engine like Gen 1 and Gen 2 instead of the 2ZR from the Gen 3 liftback, it's recognizably an offshoot from the Gen 3 period of Prius evolution.

The design of the tranny over all the generations has mostly changed sort of around the edges. The basic design with two MGs and a PSD with MG1 on the sun gear and MG2 on the ring has been a constant all along. Gen 3 introduced an extra reduction gear so MG2 can spin faster instead of harder, and the way power gets from the PSD ring to the final drive has changed from a chain to gears. Gen 4 moved the MGs from sharing the same axis to being side-by-side to take up less width in the engine bay. The MGs keep getting lighter and more efficient, final drive ratios get tweaked from one model to the next, etc.

But aside from those changes on the margins, it's been pretty much the same tranny for 22 years now.

I could be wrong about this, but I think even the 28:72 split in the PSD has been unchanged this whole time, as if it came down on tablets from a mountain.

Edit: the parking pawl was worked by a mechanical cable in Gen 1, which had a traditional shift lever. Gen 2 introduced the flat little switched-reluctance motor that moves it electrically. I haven't checked this on the c, but given that it uses a traditional shift lever too, it might possibly use a plain cable to move the pawl, as Gen 1 did. That would be another sort of details-on-the-margins change.