Hi, this might be a stupid question but it’s come to a point where it’s just unnecessary and it reached an extremely annoying point where I’ve been stuck in slow moving traffic where it constantly starts charging, using up more fuel than needed.
I drive a Yaris Y20 and I live somewhere that’s very uphill and close to a motorway.
The engine charging the hybrid battery is completely unnecessary since I’m mostly just using the engine break and then going up to a motorway.
Is there a way to either limit the engine charging to hybrid battery or to just turn off that specific function?
It’s computer controlled and nothing can be done about it.
If you have the heat on, that will also run the engine constantly
How old is the battery? Just because it says it’s almost full the software may see other things in the batteries performance that warrants the engine running. I would trust the car knows what it’s doing.
I got the car last year and at that point it was about 2-3 years old (was a lease before I bought it and had only been driven 3000 metric miles)
But yeah as someone suggested I’ll try and get a diagnostic on the battery
It sounds like you’re overthinking this. This is all designed to extract the maximum efficiency from the engine and electric system. The engine firing up at idle for a few minutes at a time is using fuel in the millilitres.
If the engine running like this bothers you to this extent you may want to consider just getting a normal petrol car.
Well it mainly bothered me when stuck in traffic and it charging itself every minute, meaning more fuel being used than it already is.
Apart from that, my way from home is just a very long down hill so in theory I could just charge it by just motor breaking. Just trying to find out if possible or not :)
Turn off AC
AC is 90% of the time… off
Does your car have the EV button on the center console anywhere? That will do what you’re asking, but it has its limitations.
It does, I always assumed it was just to force the use of the battery, at a specific window of speed (terribly explained / assumed I know and apologise)
If I’m wrong do tell cause it’s just what I assumed.
No
turn the car off . if you are not moving. re-start when the line starts moving. that way you get some forward momentum from fuel usage.
What is the ambient temperature?
Uh… well i live in western sweden by the coast… so it’s easier to say that it differs lol.
I mean atm we’re in minus Celsius, last week was like 5-8 Celsius, spring can be all between minus Celsius to something like +10 and summer all between 17-30+
It’s hard to put it into averages… at least for me. But it’s defs in the colder/freezing side so higher fuel consumption and faster battery drain is a given atm.
Is it just turning on, on its own or is it when you press the gas? I know in mine even if the battery is charged you can only press the gas a little before the engine kicks on. Can’t think of any other reason why it would do that.
No you cant turn it off but you can drive in a way to prevent it from coming on. I try to run the just batteries in the scenario you described with it 2 bars from full in stop and go traffic. The engine is coming on because of something you are doing to trigger the engine to start.
the hybrid system only recharges the battery when its needed.
I understand that, there’s been times where it’s been charging when the indicator shows that it’s 2 bars from full 🤷
Some hybrid systems also start the engine when it cools too much