What are the life expectancies of the battery in the trunk? Everything is fine but my previous experience with normal car batteries is you're lucky to get a 6th winter out of one. I have a April 2006 Prius. Is this battery unique? It's already exceeded my past experience.
Ed
It is unique in that its sole purposes are to run the SKS system when the car is 'off' and to boot the ECUs and bring the hybrid battery online when you press the 'Power' button. It doesn't run the starter like in conventional cars so it's not as heavily taxed, even in winter.
That being said it does eventually lose capacity with the result that the hybrid system has to continually try to charge it, and that causes a significant loss of fuel economy due to the ICE running more than usual. There are threads describing this symptom on priuschat.com in the forums, search for something like 'check 12v battery'.
Our 2003 Prius battery lasted to January 2009 . . . six years. But folks have gotten more and some less. I don't know that anyone has a hard number on how long they last.
Our replacement battery may be showing some initial issues so I'm thinking about getting a solar, battery tender. But there are several approaches and I haven't settle on plug-in vs solar, yet.
Bob Wilson
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