Dashboard power gauge, do I understand it?

Yes, I have an hour meter. It showed the engine ran about 2/3s of the total time on a round trip from Lexington KY to Johnson City TN of 500 miles. i observed every possible power flow and never heard the angry bees. I started in HV with a full charge and used odometer and gas receipts to calculate MPG. I forgot at a couple of stops to push HV so a few miles were in EV. I charged at each end and accounted for the small net charge lost. That reduced the MPG from 49 to 48.

I figure if you’re in HV for the whole trip, you count all the miles as HV miles. Then if you started with a full charge and the SOC goes down, you can account for the amount of charge used by immediately charging at your destination.
So I’m calling that an honest 48 MPG on a trip that included Interstate, 2 and 4 lane roads, and some local type driving through a few small towns.
Does that make sense?

 

It does, Ken. Thanks for the information.

 

Interesting observation, because this is exactly the graphical presentation of the high voltage battery operation on my 2012 Prius Plugin. When there was enough battery to run on EV, the graphic showed a green cylinder which slowly became more empty. When it was empty, it turned into a pink cylinder which ebbed and flowed as the car drove in self-activated HV, just like the Clarity does when it gets down to 2 bars.

 

Most of my driving is on EV Econ and I use the column mounted regen whenever I can. In this mode the solid blue curve more to the left end and therefore more white. (See 1st photo below).



When I switch to either sport or hv the solid blue curve shifts to the right and therefore less white. (See photo below).



The amount of blue dashed appears to be the same in both cases. I suspect that going into the dashed blue is where the ICE starts to fire up.

When running in HV mode, the excess power generated by the ICE will divert back to the high voltage battery. When in the display mode shown below, you can visually see where the power is being directed (photo was taken while I was parked so nothing really shows on it).


Regardless of what mode you are in the ICE can come on due to one of many factors such as cold temps (unsure of what the threshold is) as the battery needs to be at a certain minimum temp; to cycle fuel; the driver depresses the GO pedal beyond the blue.

 

I don't think it is battery temperature, or at least not directly. My experience is that at outside temperatures below 15°F, when you start the car, the ICE starts. I believe that this is because the logic in the controller is set that if the temperature is that cold that the battery will be unduly depleted by providing cabin heat, so they're going to tap into the waste heat from the ICE. My confirmation of that theory is that if I turn off the heat, the ICE will stop (after a delay for it to come to temperature). I'm just glad that it will be a few months before I am able to test that theory again.

This is of course just my observation, one data point, so as usual we extrapolate it to the entire Clarity population with care.