I am the proud owner of my first hybrid. I recently purchased a used 2009 Toyota Hybrid with 31,000 miles. So far I love it and it has exceeded my expectations.
I have read the manual and still have a couple of questions that I have not found addressed either in the manual or here in the forums (at least based on my searches).
My first question deals with the hybrid battery charge status and the battery meter that shows on the nav display (and shows the direction of power, etc). How "full" should the battery generally be and how quickly should it go up and down? Generally while I am driving the meter shows in the mid to high "blue bars". So far I have never seen it "fully charged". The highest I have seen it was in the green bars (I think the next the last one).
My second question is in regard to the voice command. The prompts (not the guidance prompts, but the prompts the sytem gives you when you are trying to give voice commands) seem cumbersome. I understand the idea that it is designed to limit your taking your eyes off the road, but once you are familiar with the system, I seem to be spending most of my time waiting for the system to allow me to speak.
Is there any option to turn this feature off and just have the screen prompts?
Thanks for any help. This looks like a very useful forum.

 

Somewhere I recall reading that the nominal target for charge is 60%. The amount of charge is always a bit of a compromise. Your vehicle does not know what you are going to do next. If it is a long downhill it would make sense to use up the battery before you got to the hill. If it was an uphill, the reverse would work best -- arrive at the bottom with a full charge. Net result is that the control system targets something in the middle. That said I see it all over the place. Quite often when I arrive home it is down to the last two bars (purple). I think that is because I travel nearly a mile on electric only, due to low speed in a residential neighbourhood. Overall I would rather see the battery low, rather than high. If it fully charges then it cannot store any regenerative energy in the battery, and must simply waste it. I like to see it use all energy generated by the internal combustion engine.

Can't help on the voice commands. I don't think mine does that, or at least I have never tried.

 

Press the talk button again to interrupt the prompt, and you will get the ding that lets you give your command immediately. Or just press twice quickly.

-- Alan

 

The battery-charge display is basically a gimmick. The battery is only good for a couple of miles at low speeds. Think of it as a buffer, where some excess energy from the brakes or the motor can be stored, not as an electric version of a gas tank. Let the computer manage it.

The important thing for a new driver to notice is the miles-per-gallon meter. Learning to drive gently helps a lot. Using the cruise control helps a lot, both during steady-state cruise and during acceleration-to-speed. There are a lot of details to learn, but just noticing the mpg meter and using it is a big part of learning to drive this car.

 

Hi Andrew! Welcome!

I too am relatively new to this whole hybrid thing, having gotten my 2007 TCH only about a month ago. Like yours, my battery never shows a completely full charge but is always one bar below the top at the very most. I prefer to have at least 4 bars when I park my car so that I can nudge out of my driveway using as much electric only as possible. But like some, I often end up with just 2 bars (purple) by the time I get home and park it. I am getting about 40 mpg, although that has gone down slightly since I got brand new tires a couple weeks ago, perhaps around 39 mpg according to the onboard display.

Scott

 

1. It depends. Really. The way I drive, sorta mid hypermiler effort, I have my bars almost always above mid-charge. If your battery charge drops down to 2 bars, ICE kicks in and recharges it to at least 3 bars, so that MG! can start drawing energy from it.
Battery lasts about 20 minutes in stop and go traffic.
You can get battery recharged fully and fast by rolling down a long slope, in B mode.

2. Voice command... Wish I had the wisdom of those who came up with it.. I simply never use it. Sucks bad in my 2 cents.

 

Thanks for the replies. I did find out how to turn off the prompts for the voice commands. It is under the setup and is labeled "Voice Guidance Prompts". Overall the voice command works pretty well (as long as I say "home" in a British accent when I want the nav to guide me home). If I am not particular about how I say home, it always starts looking for "dry cleaners".

 

and I have Slavic accent, so no Pierce Brosnan voice commands for me.