EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT HYBRID VEHICLES

ADVANTAGES OF A HYBRID VEHICLE

HOW DO CVT TRANSMISSIONS WORK?

FUEL ECONOMY

Three Things to Examine in Determining the Cause of Lower Gas Mileage

The quick answer is – it could be several causes. The first things to examine and rule out are the simple issues:

• Tire Inflation – this may seem simplistic and trivial but significant tire under-inflation can negatively impact your fuel economy.
• Tune-up Frequency – let’s say you were meticulous with your hybrid’s maintenance early on in your ownership but have been falling behind on the maintenance schedule lately – an out-of-tune vehicle won’t be able to deliver the fuel economy that a tuned vehicle will.
• Changing driving habits or conditions - maybe you changed jobs and your commute is longer and you’ve altered how you drive to compensate. Or you moved to another state and you’re dealing with elevation changes that you never encountered before. Subtle changes like these can impact your hybrid’s fuel performance.

HOW LONG DO HYBRID BATTERIES LAST?

Honda vs Toyota Hybrid Batteries

With the way the Honda system is configured, the vehicle can be driven with a very, very weak battery.  Typically what happens is that a battery problem occurs and a warning light is triggered (the dreaded IMA light as it’s officially known).  The vehicle begins to utilize the battery less and less but for a wide variety of reasons, the customer keeps driving the vehicle for an extended period of time. Sometimes the Honda owner doesn’t feel compelled to get it checked right away. Or, they did take it in for an assessment and the dealer recommends a battery replacement and the high cost to do so prohibited them from replacing it. The longer the Honda battery operates in that diminished state, the more difficult it is to condition it back to life.

The experience our dealers are having with Toyotas is a little different due to the way the Toyota hybrid system is configured. If the battery starts to have problems, it’s likely that the owner won’t be able to drive the car – essentially, the battery is dead.This prevents the battery from reaching such a diminished state that either major components need replacement to restore it – or restoration is not an option at all.

Many Honda hybrids arrive at dealers’ shops and the batteries are in such a diminished state that baseline performance readings are not even possible.  A battery in this condition will likely need one or two charging cycles just to get current condition readings.  And due to the fact that the battery has reached this diminished state, more components need to be replaced if a successful restoration is to occur.

Our dealers for The Hybrid Shop are finding it easier to get an initial performance reading on the Toyotas, again, primarily due to the power system configuration.  With that initial reading in hand, and more often than not, a single charge cycle will provide an idea of how quickly the battery will recover.

Keep in mind that even within each brand, differences in driving habits, driving conditions and maintenance history will have an impact on hybrid battery recovery potential. If you are either a Honda or Toyota hybrid owner and are experiencing fuel economy or performance issues, your battery may be a significant contributing factor.