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Well I think I found why the vehicle was sold for scrap. The gauge cluster went blank on me today. Center screen still worked but no mpg figures. It still drove normal. I left it off for a while and when I turned it back on, the screen worked again and I think the trip was still counting up.
Going off of the in car indicators, I'm averaging about 47mpg so far. I'm sure I'm doing some things wrong for best mpg. Taking off real easy letting it take off on electric only generally to about 20mph before the engine kicks on and cruising at 55mph. Once the battery is charged and the engine is warmed up, I'm seeing around 50-60mpg in cruise. For fun today I dropped my speed down to 45 and it bounced around 60-80mpg. Seems like this car really likes going slower speeds.
With a cold engine, I'm not sure what the best method of driving is. It seems like the first 5 mins I'm seeing around 25-30mpg average as indicated at least, so I'll have to work on getting that better. From what I've seen other people driving the car more or less normal is beating me there but I'm not sure what speeds they are traveling out, the videos are always later in the drive which I'm seeing good mpg at those points.
For the hybrid battery, I drove to my dad's house on his road 30mph electric only and parked it. It started off 2 bars from full, and parked with still 2 bars from full. When I left I went 35mph which seems to be mostly electric even though the engine was running for warmup mode. By the time I got to the corner I noticed the battery's state of charged dropped suddenly to 2 bars of charge. People online were saying with a healthy battery they can get about 2 miles on purely electric mode, looking like I'm around 1 mile, but it has 263k miles, so if it's at 50% capacity, or needs balanced, I think that would make perfect sense.
Anyway, I'll have to research the gauge cluster issue, I suspect it's bad capacitors which are easy enough to fix. I probably should have gotten a pic of it, basically everything was out except check engine light (tire pressure light went out, but check engine replaced it lol), cruise didn't work either.
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