[EcoMama]

My battery charge levels stay pretty much around the 3-4 bar mark. I have only twice seen the charge level at Green. That was after going on a rural hwy about 40 mph for 20 miles while the battery charged up. From what I see here, it seems others have higher battery charge than mine is doing. Is this a problem or does it not make a difference if the battery is all full or partly full as long as it has some juice?

 

[Canadian Prius]

Yours sounds about right, compared to my experience. The compter aims to keep the charge at about four bars. Less bars means there won't be adequate power when needed, and more bars means that the system is not taking advantage of the available power.

Mine goes to seven bars (first green stage) every day when I go down my 200 foot hill, and it goes to eight bars when I drive on the downward side of a mountain pass.

At the green stages there seems to be noticeably more driving power from the battery both in strength and endurance.

On the other hand, I get two red bars (first stage of red) when I accelerate up over 90 mph, or when I go up through a mountain pass. Only once did I get it down to one red bar, also over a mountain pass.

If you sit in the car without the engine running but with the AC on, it will go down to red bars.

Generally the car is designed so that it takes care of itself, and you can drive it as you like with almost no chance of doing it harm. The computer senses any dangerous conditions you might be heading for, and takes evasive action. What a great vehicle!!

 

[Daniel]

The actual range of charge you will see is going to depend on your conditions: terrain, driving style, type of roads, etc. What you describe is perfectly normal.

 

[AgentElrond]

My trip to/from work normally starts out at 5-6 bars, depending on how bad traffic was on the previous trip. It'll drop to 3-4 as I crawl out of the neighborhood while the ICE warms up, and then be back at 5-6 by the time I complete the trip (about a half hour). So far, I've only hit (or noticed) 7 bars once, so you're at least one up on me.

 

[jshore]

Mine is most often on 6 bars...and occasionally drops down to 5 or 4. It goes up to 7 very occasionally, most often when I go down one of the bigger hills here in Rochester. The only times I have seen it up at 8 bars is when I was going down so really mondo-hills near Ithaca in the Finger Lakes.

As others have explained on these boards, it is engineered to try to stay in a specific range. They don't want to keep it charged full because then you won't be able to charge it further through the regenerative stuff...Or if the ICE has to run to warm up, it won't have a place to store the extra power it is producing. On the other hand, they don't want it to drain too close to empty because that isn't good on the batteries and also means that it wouldn't be able to take advantage of running on mainly electric if you hit a stretch of road amenable to this. So, it seems that the engineers designed it to stay around 1/2 - 3/4 charged most of the time and occasionally go higher or lower than that only if conditions warrant.

 

[wombatua]

Six is normal for me - I hit eight for the first time this past weekend while visiting my aunt in West Virginia and driving down a few hills into Charleston, but in normal traffic around Dayton I rarely seen green. From the three weeks or so that I've driven the no. 3 I bought and from what I've read from other posters, I wouldn't worry about battery levels too much. I left the car at home for a week for a trip to California, and it started and ran with no problems when I returned, showing five or six bars.

 

[melgish]

3-4 bars? Have we got two different displays? Or are we counting from different ends.

Mine seems to want to stay in the middle of the top segment. This morning was the first time I got mine out on the highway, and at one point the charge indicator went green, and was 1 bar from the top. After a few miles it droped back down

 

[Daniel]

During winter, when the ICE never shut off because the heater was always on full-blast (20 to 30 degrees below zero in the morning, zero or thereabouts in the afternoon) my battery always showed 6 or 7 bars. Now that summer is here, it generally hovers around 4 or 5 bars, but still has a tendency to go up to 6 during the warm-up cycle and will go down to 3 on a good stretch of electric mode driving.

It will hit 2 bars in the morning if it was at 3 overnight, since it draws mainly from the battery during the first minute or so, when the ICE is cold.

 

[AgentElrond]

3-4 bars? Have we got two different displays? Or are we counting from different ends.

Could be one or the other or both, depending on whether we're just comparing 2004's. In my case anyway, it's a 2004 and I'm counting the number of "lit" bars (from the bottom).