Yes, you can charge the battery while driving: my plug-in experience

So,
I remember back when it was announced that there would be a single large battery in the Pip, people were wondering whether this meant that you could charge the battery while going down a long slope.

Well, I have great news: indeed you can.

My mom bought a plug-in through Dianne, but unfortunately at the moment has no place to charge it (home is an apartment with no easily accessible outlets; work has no outside outlets at all).

Earlier this week, we drove from Torrance to Joshua Tree NP, then to Desert Hot Springs to spend the night, and then to Palm Springs Aerial Tramway before returning to Torrance. Here's a rough path of our trip: Torrance, CA to Torrance, CA - Google Maps

Since my mom can't charge the battery anywhere, we obviously started with the battery that shows individual bars, with all bars except for the top two. On the first day, I managed to first regen the battery to approximately 4.2 miles of range, which we used for an all-EV trip to a local Vons and back. On the second day, I regened the battery to a max of about 5 miles, after which it was gradually depleted in blended mode, returning home with 4.7 miles remaining for my mom's commute the following day.

A note about how I drive: 9 miles above the speed limit, cruise control whenever possible (including "traffic"), proactive lane changes to maintain a constant speed, and turns taken at 15-20 mph above the "recommended" speed in the yellow square sign. Going through the park I was rarely going below 50. I-10 has a speed limit of 70, so I was going 79 — not the best speed for this car.

Trip stats: 388 miles (reset the tripmeter after we got on the freeway), 47 mpg, Avg speed 52 mph.

Now, some notes about the driving experience as a whole:
–EV mode would kick in automatically as soon as there was about 2 miles of EV range available. I'm not sure I like that.
–When changing iPod tracks using the steering wheel, all that's shown is "iPod"+a track number; no artist or track name. Kind of ridiculous.
–Since the fuel economy info was up by the windshield, I ended up rarely using the 6" screen. Most of the time it was on the map (no navigation), just so I could make sure I wasn't driving off in the completely wrong direction, and sometimes it would be on the audio screen, because of the aforementioned "no track info" issue when skipping. For commuting, the screen actually feels a bit superfluous.
–I noticed that traffic-based rerouting is turned off by default. Any ideas as to why?
–Really miss the bigger-size opening button on the hatch like the Gen II had. I kept hitting the space between the unlock and lock buttons whenever I wanted to open the hatch.
–Noticed that all the warning stickers (including clearly pip-specific ones) under the hood had Russian translations. Wow…last place I would expect the plug-in to go on sale, for a multitude of reasons.
–EDIT: I LOVE that the fuel filler door release is a button and not a pull-style lever on the floor. I HATE that it's so close to the indoor backlight level adjustment knob that it's really easy to hit accidentally while driving!

I have a couple of photos of the MID, if people are interested. Comments/questions welcome!

 

Re: default modes: well, the mode definitely doesn't persist across the car getting turned off/on. in terms of whether, while in HEV mode with sufficient charge, your charge drops, and then goes back up again? I would suspect that it would go into EV mode anyway, but the chances of this scenario playing out are pretty slim (from my experience on this trip the battery draw is not very high in blended mode).

Re: fuel door, do not know, didn't try

 

John, if you look at the terrain view on that map, you'll see that I was, in fact, driving up and down mountains.

I got almost 5 miles of charging from zero. The pack showed about half-full.

It was actual EV mode. The green EV mode indicator that's next to ECO MODE near the speedometer blinked a few times and then stayed on, and the ecometer changed to the EV-mode one with no middle divider.

 

(in other words, given my experience, if you had a long-enough hill, you can fully recharge the pack)

 

FWIW, on the drive back, I was always going 79 or 74, with the exception of one mountain pass which was only two lanes and people driving too slow. So it's not entirely clear to me how aggressively the battery pack gets depleted in HV mode given that I started with about 5.1 at the peak and ended up with 4.7.

 

hah, wait until you see my videos

 

keep in mind I intentionally left it in blended HV mode as opposed to EV mode. Why?

Simple, my mom has a 33-mile commute to work, of which the first 2.3 miles is on street driving with 40 mph speed limits, followed by freeway driving in the carpool lane. What I did was a strategic choice so that the following day she could drive gas-free on the low-speed portion of her commute and then have the engine kick in once she's on the freeway and driving at a constant highway speed.

I am very happy that the car let me do this.

(side note: again, look at my speeds. it would be a waste for HSD to waste battery power attempting to propel the car at 79 mph.)