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Ahh I see, that makes sense. A few things didn't seem to line up with what my car seems to do.
Anyway, another small update, I did the EV mode button mod. Need to get a button yet, but now that I've looked at the wire diagram and such, I see what the mod was intended to do for the switch side of it. Basically the instructions are to hook the EV mode pin on the computer to the headlight switch where you normally pull black to flash the brights is converted to ev mode (or spliced so it does both).
Electrically speaking, it's a momentary connection to ground, so a normal push button that doesn't latch on would be perfect, there's a couple knock outs on the left side of the steering wheel, so that seems to be the simplest place to install the switch.
For right now, I just have wires ran willy nilly to test out the mode. Looks like it doesn't work as an engine kill switch if you're going 35mph or faster, but being able to turn the engine off at lower speeds is kind of nice when coasting when the car doesn't want to turn it off on it's own for whatever reason.
Also my scan gauge glitched, bunch of the names of sensors have a jumbled up character like MPH turned into something like M@H and the MPG gauge was stuck at 2808. Not sure what's going on, but hopefully once it's been long enough for this "trip" to be cleared out of memory, it will return to normal.
Seems like EV mode limits the discharge to about 45%, I was messing around and took off hard and it ended up dropping down to 39.5%. With the little ev mode messing around I did, i was hoping to see what kind of mpg it would have gotten, I only assume it was worse than normal since it wasn't really being used in ideal situations.
I think the throttle pedal mod would probably give me more effect than the EV mode button, but it's nice to have at least limited control over the engine getting turned off. I'm kind of thinking it would be interesting to do something similar for making the engine stay running and see if I can measure the effectiveness of switching between ev mode and charging the battery vs steady state driving in normal hybrid mode say at 35mph. My guess would be letting the car do the ev mode then recharge would give better overall mpg vs forcing the engine to stay on and avoid using the battery at all. Concept is pretty simple, hvac settings to max heat and leave the windows cracked (same amount for both tests) to keep engine heat demand on. If that doesn't work. maybe there's something else I could do with the wiring.
Oh yea, looks like my wiring has already been messed with some, looks like 4 wires or so have electrical tape wrapped around them that doesn't look factory. Half scared to pull back the tape to see how the splices are made.
Just thought of a potential way to trick the computer into making the engine stay on with no extra load. Pull the 10 amp A/C (HTR) fuse and the inverter for the ac compressor won't have power and the ac water pump looses power too. Clearly would need to be tested, but might be an option. It's not too hard to add a relay + fuse to remotely control the power to the AC system and have the power on a toggle switch. Would be interesting to test with at least.
Looks like the ac controls are done over the canbus, so that might be another option, but no experience in that area yet.
Got word back from the company I ordered the trailer light kit from, I have another week to wait, it ships out around the 17th and I should get it around the 20th. I guess that's around the time I get to install the kit, the hitch, and assemble the back half of the car like it should be.
I still need to swap out the interior lights for LED's as well, first ones I saw back when I thought of that weren't cheap, I don't need anything fancy, just less power draw than stock is what I'm going for to draw the battery down less. Even though the battery doesn't have much capacity, it seems to be doing alright so far. Would prefer to hold off on the battery at least closer to winter time since the correct battery is around $200.
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