Do not be scared of using that charge button.

[anko]

Yet, I have asked Dobrin if he noted fuel consumption @ 130 km/h without Charge mode.

He came back with:

Dobrin Nedev It was around 8.5-9l/100km but it was changing depending on the inclination, which should be expected.
From my experience the generator usually adds 3l/h fuel rate, the same like when you charge stationary. And depending on the speed it translates to around 2-2.5l/100km

This would suggest that hysteresis cycle would be more expensive than no hysteresis cycle... At least at 130 km/h. Maybe this is also why there is no charging going on by default at 130 km/h?

 

[HPM1111]

Hello all,

from my recent experience driving through mountain roads I advice the following:
going uphill - EV Mode
going downhill - regen + CHARGE mode

using this method I averaged 1L/100 less than a Renault Scenic 1.5 diesel that did the same journeys I did.

I also urge everyone to use CHARGE to force parallell hybrid rather than SAVE which often preffers serial hybrid.
Appollogies for the brief post but I wrote a giant detailled one but it logged out and I lost it so I´m a bit fumming.

Regards,

Henrique

 

[elm70]

Hello all,

from my recent experience driving through mountain roads I advice the following:
going uphill - EV Mode
going downhill - regen + CHARGE mode

using this method I averaged 1L/100 less than a Renault Scenic 1.5 diesel that did the same journeys I did.

I also urge everyone to use CHARGE to force parallell hybrid rather than SAVE which often preffers serial hybrid.
Appollogies for the brief post but I wrote a giant detailled one but it logged out and I lost it so I´m a bit fumming.

Regards,

Henrique

Strange indeed ... at least for me

Downhill with charge on and I guess max regen ... it sounds that that the ICE will start stop multiple times, and running for few seconds ... so it does not look efficient

But .. it is very up about the type of uphill an downhill ... thinking of mountain streets ... I can't see how can be possible to go over 60/70km/h while downhill ... unless is a highway on mountains ... Charge for me make sense every time the PHEV is running above 70km/h for at least 20/30 seconds

 

[anko]

going uphill - EV Mode

How far is that going to take you?

going downhill - regen + CHARGE mode

From my experience and measurements, charge mode while regening does not do anything other than burn fuel to make the ICE idle. Seems like a very bad advice to me.

using this method I averaged 1L/100 less than a Renault Scenic 1.5 diesel that did the same journeys I did.

Have you tried other methods to see if these produced even better results?

With this approach you are dumping electricity into the battery at very high rate while going down and extracting it from the batter at very high rate while going up. Bad for the battery and bad for economy, if you ask me. It seems so much more logical to go up in charge mode and down in EV/ regen mode. Than you burn fuel when the power is needed and you don't loose energy by charging / discharging the battery.

I also urge everyone to use CHARGE to force parallell hybrid rather than SAVE which often preffers serial hybrid.

I don't believe Save mode has a preference for serial hybrid mode. At least not at speeds > 65 km/h.

 

[HPM1111]

@elm70:

The mountain roads I travelled were very narrow and twisty, even though there was no traffic I seldom went over 50km/h.

"Downhill with charge on and I guess max regen ... it sounds that that the ICE will start stop multiple times, and running for few seconds ... so it does not look efficient"

there´s no such thing as "max regen" maximum regen is always a variable of terrain and speed, if you are going downhill at 40 km/h in B5 you will often need to apply a bit of pressure on the throtle (effectively moving from B5 to say B4/B3) to keep going and you will not be regening much at any point in time at those speeds.
Again I did not go over this in much detail in this brief post but this was the result of a trip of almost 500km exclusively in mountain roads at low speeds.
When I did CHARGE going downhill I always very low battery capacity (having used it going uphill) and the ICE never start stopped, it just kept working at steady RPM untill I depressed CHARGE.

 

[HPM1111]

going uphill - EV Mode
How far is that going to take you?

Obviously it would deppend on how long the uphill stretch was vs battery capacity, but, with very few exceptions and assuming a relatively "round trip", the downhilldistance coasting with REGEN + CHARGE would provide enough battery capacity to do overcome the uphill stretches.


HPM1111 wrote:
going downhill - regen + CHARGE mode
From my experience and measurements, charge mode while regening does not do anything other than burn fuel to make the ICE idle. Seems like a very bad advice to me.
Can´t really add much to this but as mentioned in my repply to elm70 you cannot use max regen for a long time without stopping the car, perhaps if going on a 30% incline downhill in B5 while braking.
As I´m sure you know b5 only reaches the half the CHARGE dial (and even that requires quite a bit of speed to start with) the second half is achieved by braking. So there´s a lot of a charging "headroom" besides what you get from just letting "gravitational regen" occur. I achieved this conclusion by experimenting, not just once but several times.

HPM1111 wrote:
using this method I averaged 1L/100 less than a Renault Scenic 1.5 diesel that did the same journeys I did.
Have you tried other methods to see if these produced even better results?
I did and just letting the car do it´s thing was worse than the Renault by 0.5l
Using CHARGE going uphill and just coast downhill was 0.1/0.2 L better than the Scenic

With this approach you are dumping electricity into the battery at very high rate while going down and extracting it from the batter at very high rate while going up. Bad for the battery and bad for economy, if you ask me. It seems so much more logical to go up in charge mode and down in EV/ regen mode. Than you burn fuel when the power is needed and you don't loose energy by charging / discharging the battery.
I totally understand where you come from and that is what believed also before trying it. It´s not bad for the economy according to what I tested. As for the batteries i don´t believe it is a problem, the discharge rate even at very low battery capacity is overseen by the car and is no different from standard motorway where it goes in serial hybrid with nearly zero battery. As for dumping a lot of eletricity I actually believe it is better to do it this way rather than use the batteries as pass-through for the power from the ICE when going up hill.

HPM1111 wrote:
I also urge everyone to use CHARGE to force parallell hybrid rather than SAVE which often preffers serial hybrid.
I don't believe Save mode has a preference for serial hybrid mode. At least not at speeds > 65 km/h
You are correct what I meant is that SAVE will ALTERNATE between parallel and EV

 

[anko]

As for dumping a lot of electricity I actually believe it is better to do it this way rather than use the batteries as pass-through for the power from the ICE when going up hill.

This is not how batteries work. Energy is never flowing through the battery. It either goes in or it comes out. When the generator and the motors are running at the same time, electricity from the generator goes directly to the motors.

 

[HPM1111]

I did not mean it literally as a passthrough but that going uphill with CHARGE pressed any surplus energy the generator may have available to charge the battery will be used by the motors imediatelly.
I just mean to offer advice from my experience specially since I have collected so much from everyone here, if you wish to try it you may draw your own conclusions and I´d love to hear about it.

 

[anko]

I did not mean it literally as a passthrough but that going uphill with CHARGE pressed any surplus energy the generator may have available to charge the battery will be used by the motors imediatelly.

Imagine it takes 35 kW on average to drive up hill. That means, in your approach, the battery would be discharged at an average rate of 35 kW going up hill and charged at an average rate 35 kW going downhill. My approach could, for example, lead to a average discharge rate of 5 kW going uphill (as most energy used is coming straight from the generator) en an average charge rate of 5 kW going downhill (as you are only regenning, and not charging). With your approach, the full kWh amount of kWh needed for the climb must first be charged into the battery and later discharged. Nothing bypasses the battery. I think this is harsh on the battery and bat for efficiency.

I just mean to offer advice from my experience specially since I have collected so much from everyone here, ...

And that is highly appreciated!

 

[STS134]

Hello all,

from my recent experience driving through mountain roads I advice the following:
going uphill - EV Mode
going downhill - regen + CHARGE mode

Yikes. That's excessively bad for your battery. Going uphill, you're consuming usually 30-60 kW. For a Tesla with an oversized battery, that's fine. But for our smaller 12 kWh batteries, that's a discharge rate of 3C or more. Then when you are going downhill, you are dumping energy into the battery at 3C or more as well. Great way to kill your battery quickly.

It's way better to use CHARGE mode going uphill. Keep the ICE running, and put only surplus power into the battery (and the system limits charge rate to around 1C anyway). Then use Normal mode when going downhill. After you finish going downhill and come to an area where it's flat or you are climbing again, drop it into SAVE mode so it doesn't immediately consume the energy it put in.

 

[STS134]

Hello all,

from my recent experience driving through mountain roads I advice the following:
going uphill - EV Mode
going downhill - regen + CHARGE mode

Yikes. That's excessively bad for your battery. Going uphill, you're consuming usually 30-60 kW. For a Tesla with an oversized battery, that's fine. But for our smaller 12 kWh batteries, that's a discharge rate of 3C or more. Then when you are going downhill, you are dumping energy into the battery at 3C or more as well. Great way to kill your battery quickly.

It's way better to use CHARGE mode going uphill. Keep the ICE running, and put only surplus power into the battery (and the system limits charge rate to around 1C anyway). Then use Normal mode when going downhill. After you finish going downhill and come to an area where it's flat or you are climbing again, drop it into SAVE mode so it doesn't immediately consume the energy it put in.

I did not mean it literally as a passthrough but that going uphill with CHARGE pressed any surplus energy the generator may have available to charge the battery will be used by the motors imediatelly.
I just mean to offer advice from my experience specially since I have collected so much from everyone here, if you wish to try it you may draw your own conclusions and I´d love to hear about it.

Now that's a good idea, and I do it all the time on the freeways in Save mode. Not only does it prevent the battery from discharging at a high rate (2C or more), but it also avoids the round trip through the battery, which tends to lose about 10-20% of the energy. You are correct, the best way to minimize power losses in the system is to generate the electricity and consume it immediately. Batteries are typically only about 80-90% efficient (you only get out about 80-90% of what you put in).

 

[Trex]

In my experience once you are in parallel mode at that sort of speed, pressing Charge has little effect, (I am usually on Cruise Control) as all the power is going to the wheels with nothing left over for the battery. It will only be in an "overrun" situation (i.e. when going downhill) that you get some charging. So yes, the battery will get charged during high speed driving but very slowly.

You realise he wrote km/h, not MPH? If what you said was true, you would not be able to maintain such speed in the long run. At 110 km/h there is plenty of surplus power to recharge the battery and allow the ICE to be switched off about 1/4 of the time. It is quite different when climbing or towing ;-)

Yes and 110 km/h is 68 mph i.e. just below the UK legal limit, which is what I cruise at on a motorway. I can assure you that Charge has the effect I described in my car - I did say "in my experience". Irrespective of our different "experiences" I don't understand why you should say that my description wouldn't allow such speed in the long run? - unless you run out of petrol :lol:

I would agree that cruising at (UK) motorway speeds the Charge button has little effect. Clearly the car does have the power output to cruise for prolonged periods at significantly higher speeds - I have always assumed that the designers took the decision to reduce the charge rate to a trickle at those speeds in order to improve fuel consumption.

Ok just noticed this in the topic I started and will say that on my PHEVs at 110 kph GPS approx 115kph dash I can charge the drive battery from empty on the gauge to approx 50% in roughly 1/2 hour. This has always been my rule ie 1/2 a charge in 1/2 hour. BUT the remaining approx 35% that my PHEV charges to and then stops charging ie approx 85% takes roughly another 1/2 hour because as we know the charging rate slows down as we fill the drive battery.

So Mr greendwarf Sir and maby may have been looking at the charge rate when the battery SOC was already quite high.

 

[greendwarf]

Interesting Trex - of course my comment was anecdotal rather than measured - but like Maby I've noticed little battery charging at around 70mph/110 kmph on longer motorway journeys having run it down to "flat" - typically when making a return journey after using all my Saved charge at the distant location.

However, on my more regular return trips from outside London, I do see a faster charge rate but there are long 50mph sections on that road. :?

 

[ThudnBlundr]

I've noticed that it does seem to take a while to charge with the ACC set at 70mph, but I hadn't noticed the decline above 50%. I'm not disagreeing - I've just not seen it

What I have done is become much more active in my use of the Charge button: I now only tend to use it when I'm going downhill, as I assume the ICE has more "spare" power then. As soon as it gets flat or uphill, I switch it back to Save. It obviously takes more effort, but I have noticed it charges up considerably more quickly when doing that than just leaving it.

 

[elm70]

Ok .. possibly there is downhill and downhill ...

I would expect to switch in EV mode and disable ICE charge when going downhill, since regen brake should be more then enough for charge the battery

But .. for a small and short downhill on motorway ... actually I don't bother to change my charge setting.

Anyhow ... use charge might be good .. but since it is charging the battery quite fast .. I would suggest to don't use in cold weather nor above 80% SOC ... else it might impact on battery life.

I think the sweat spot for battery protection, it is to charge and discharge the battery when SOC is around 30% ... so for better preserve the battery the best is to let the car do its business on its own

 

[ThudnBlundr]

I'm not talking about regen, as few, if any, hills on UK motorways are steep enough for regen. But if you watch the power meter as you're going downhill, it's often only just above horizontal. The car's using little power for movement, so has plenty "spare" to charge. So even just using Charge for a minute or two can put significant amounts of energy back into the battery. As I said, I find it far more efficient to do it that way than simply run Charge for a while. Also the charge times are short, so less of an issue with high charge rates

 

[Trex]

Interesting Trex - of course my comment was anecdotal rather than measured - but like Maby I've noticed little battery charging at around 70mph/110 kmph on longer motorway journeys having run it down to "flat" - typically when making a return journey after using all my Saved charge at the distant location.

However, on my more regular return trips from outside London, I do see a faster charge rate but there are long 50mph sections on that road. :?

Sorry Mr greenwarf Sir I did not mean to be rude as I just noticed this. Its a Saturday morning here at work and I need to hang around the phone ready to take calls from my customers. None of my employees work on Saturdays unless we are behind in our work so I am on my own here at the moment.

Now on my PHEVs there is no noticeable difference in the charging rate at the speeds I can travel around here legally in parallel mode.

Edit Starting to warm up over there yet in the Sarf Lundon Alps? Days are getting noticeable shorter here. :lol:

 

[Trex]

I've noticed that it does seem to take a while to charge with the ACC set at 70mph, but I hadn't noticed the decline above 50%. I'm not disagreeing - I've just not seen it

Hi ThudnBlundr, BTW love that name.

There are a few tests I have done where that decline above 50% shows up. Will try to start another topic here later to show them and put them in the one thread.

Regards Trex.

 

[Trex]

it does not have anything that I would describe as a gearbox - and I understand the Toyota drive train very well.

Just noticed this in the topic I started.

Ok as a mechanical engineer I need to step in here and say you are wrong IMHO. Unless everything I have been taught in standard definitions and such in my career has just all been crap. :lol:

This is starting to sound just like the time you were calling, from memory, Series (not Serial as you have written elsewhere) mode a CVT.

If you knew the "Toyota drive train very well" , and I have owned two Toyota HSD powered cars, you would know that it has epicyclic gear train (gear train or mechanical transmission or simply gearbox) that is also called a planetary gear train.

The petrol engine and electric motor couple into two ports of a three port differential and the third port is coupled to the input port of a second three port differential with the wheels on the other two ports.

Ok this I would also consider to be misleading. Although a epicyclic gear train (gear train or mechanical transmission or simply gearbox) that is also called a planetary gearbox CAN be used as a type of mechanical differential I would not calling the HSD that uses a planetary gearbox, that is used by Toyota as a power-split device, a "three port differential". Hell, I would not be saying any mechanical differential has 3 "ports" instead it has 3 shafts IMO.

Maby are sure you are not getting mixed up with computer or IC (or microcontroller) engineering terms with mechanical or electrical engineering terms. Serial (as in for example Serial and Parallel communications) instead of Series and Parallel Hybrids or Series and Parallel electrical circuits and then "ports" as in ports like used in computers or ICs?

Ps I myself have accidentally written Serial (or Cereal :lol: ), because usually others are throwing that word around, instead of Series but very, very seldom IMO. But you I consider to be one of the main Serial offenders. :lol: Get it? :lol:

 

[Bearhunter]

and just to throw a fox into the hen house, no one here seems to be taking into consideration that the speedometer on the Outlander is off by %5

check your clock against Waze Garmin or any other decent GPS and at 112 km ph shown on the car, the GPS will constantly show 107
%5 is an appreciable amount with the tolerances being discussed