Honda Clarity switching from EV to D

To the effected folks, yep that is odd. KentuckyKen helped me with some weird issues I had. He had me "reboot" my car by removing one the terminals on the 12v battery, then replace it. I always do the negative first when I remove, so I'd just remove that one wait a few seconds then replace it. The car will give you tons of scary warnings. Ignore them. Drive the car about 10 miles total and they all go away.

So if you have a charge (like you say you do) and you don't depress HV, and you don't push the peddle past the detent, then you should stay in EV mode. I drive every day, and 90% of the time is EV mode for me. My commute in total is about 20miles per day, so even in the winter I don't need to burn gas.

There is a couple of separate issues, if you have a full charge and immediately go down hill, you might see your car fire up gas engine (there's a work-around for that, so let us know if you encounter it). And once every long time, the car will run the motor for maintenance if you otherwise never use it.

 

There is still a bug which is triggered if you regen brake right after a full charge (or go downhill). The engine will kick in in order to release the energy it can't otherwise send to the full batteries, which is ok, and the engine should shut off after it warms up (similar to when you floor the pedal).

But, the car gets in a weird HV mode instead. The blue circle line stays all white, even if the car goes in EV mode. And it very easily goes out of EV with just a slight acceleration. I've driven for over 20 minutes like this and the engine basically stayed on all the time.

If put it in HV mode, the car behaves as such, and the blue circle adjusts depending on how much the car needs to maintain or use battery. But take it out of HV mode, the circle goes again all white. I tried switching it to Sport or Econ but made no difference.

Power off the car, and back and on, and the problem goes away. Very reproduceable.

 

It still sounds to me that people are just pushing the accelerator too far, triggering the gas engine to come on for more power. IIRC, the detent is keyed to the trigger point when in Econ, but it will trigger at an earlier, not-felt point when in standard mode. People vary in how aggressively they accelerate, and if not in Econ the only way to avoid engine triggering is to watch the power gauge and keep it below that 3/4 point.