MNSteve
Well-Known Member
I am sure that there was a struggle between the engineering side of the house and the marketing side of the house on this issue. Market differentiation is a big deal in all products, and none more than automobiles. The question of how far down to allow the battery charge to go is also the question of what EV range you can claim for the car. Making it more like a Prius reduces the differentiation and makes it more likely that a buyer will choose the Prius.Actually- the Prius Prime PHEV cannot run its electric side down completely. I can assure you our Clarity can (mine does frequently) which yields the angry bees sound of gas-only mode. So if it were the case that our car would switch to HV automatically once a certain amount of EV is has been expended it would work more like a Prius. I would welcome that all-day-long, but understanding my preference isn't everyones' I'd be delighted to have persistent modes which is what jdonalds said.
I would like to see an settable option on the point at which the car automatically switches from EV to HV. Right now that's set to "two bars" which is so low that the battery is not an effective source of motive power. If you're dead set on harvesting the last few electrons of battery charge, you can set it low or override the automatic switch. If you want to avoid the angry bees at the cost of a few miles of EV range, you can set it higher. Yes, we can watch the charge level and manually switch to HV when it drops to our personal threshold, but it would be nice if the car would do that for us.