I assume you can’t jump start a Prius, but they just did it in this awful movie I was watching so I thought I would ask. I wouldn’t think the battery voltages would be compatible or that the power requirements would be in the right ballpark.
The Prius does have a gas engine of some sort in it, it’s not entirely electric - could you jump start that?
Presumably, the gas engine is started by the weird Prius battery and there is not a separate starter battery just for the gas engine.
The Prius has a 12v battery. It is used mostly to keep the computer running. The 12v battery is in the back but there is a terminal under the front hood for hooking it up.
If the 12v battery was dead you could boot up the computer by jump starting - but to get the engine running you need the big battery pack. If that is dead you prerty much have to go to the shop.
Brian
From the Prius manual:
When we just got our new Prius, we didn’t know yet that you have to drive it at least once every two weeks, or the battery will empty itself. So when I had once left the car stand still for a month (we do most of our stuff by bike) the battery turned out to be dead, and a mechanic had to come and jumpstart the car, and then I had to drive at least twenty minutes without stopping.
Sounds like the plot of a “B” movie! Good thing you didn’t get pulled over by the cops.
Maastricht, I would think you had to drive and keep the engine running when stopped… and that stopping was actually creating some of the electric charge required for the batteries.
:o This is correct, of course. I could stop the car, but not the engine.
As Turek shows, the owners manual does indicate you can do this.
I can tell you first hand that you can do this the other way round - just last week we used our Prius to jump start a Chevy Trailblazer.
This is interesting. Why wouldn’t they design the system so that the big battery pack could jump the 12 volt by pressing a button. Why bother with a 12V at all? Wouldn’t more space for the big battery pack be better?
A number of electrical devices – light bulbs are one example – are much more feasibly run on 12 volts than on the much higher voltage of the battery pack. Having a 12-volt battery for these is simpler and less expensive than incorporating a transformer (or whatever the appropriate component is) to provide 12 volts.
Yes you can jump start it, I’ve done it before. The procedure’s pretty much the same: Open the hood, hook the cables to the battery and a ground, hook the other end to another car, run that for a minute then turn the Prius on. Good as new.
Yep - we had to use my husband’s Ford Escape hybrid to jump my '85 Corvette just this weekend. Mr. Snicks wanted to take pictures.
Transformer wouldn’t work – this is DC, not AC, and transformers only work on AC. You’d need an even more complicated * expensive component.
there are plenty of dc-dc converters and they’re no more complicated or expensive than an ac-dc transformer.
Wouldn’t a resistor act as a simple DC to DC converter. It would be very inefficient, but wouldn’t it be effective for a long enough to jump start the small battery with the big battery? It seems like such an obvious function. Why should you have to find another source of power to start your car when you’ve got a massive NiMH battery right there?
It sounds as if the designers have taken care that the car can be recovered from a blackstart situation. That is where there is no power in anything. Thus they have designed it so that you can start the car, with a totally dead main power store, with just the secondary, seperate, standard 12 volt system. And further, they have ensured that that subsystem can be started when it is dead with normally available (i.e. another car) power. One might argue about avoiding a subsiduary battery, but you could easily end up in a very difficult to recover from situation. So, if the designers didn’t do it this way, I would be asking very hard questions.
As mentioned, a lot of conventional car electronics are alreday designed to work off 12 volts. I can’t see Toyota suddenly deciding to go out and specially craft new electronics for the higher voltages for no good reason, and at great expense. The electornics of a modern car is a very complex place when it comes to electronics. There can be dozens, if not more, processors, many communication busses, and a wide variety of critical sensors and actuators. All of these are designed around 12 volts. Most, if not all, are not made by the car manufacturer.
A big DC-DC converter would be a solution, but it adds expense, complexity, and you end up back with the very nasty failure mode whereby the car is not jump-startable.
The beauty of the Prius, in many ways, is that it is a conventinal car in all respects except for the add-on electric genemotor, its power controller, and batteries. A total failure of that system leaves you with a perfectly useful conventional car. It makes a great deal of sense to keep the two halves well seperated.
Yes, but can you PUSH START it?
Roger
I thought it was mentioned upthread that if the big battery pack were dead, you had to take it into the shop. I thought that jump starting only worked for the little 12V battery being dead.