One effect of the winter-that-is is that I’m driving into school more; this is partly due to the fact that the obligations of shovelling various walkways (including the one from the street to my building on campus) are being honoured more in the breach than the observance, and partly because my typical day on campus has me leaving several hours after the sun has gone down, which isn’t ideal for walking home for half an hour. (I tried, last week, and I was about ten minutes into the walk when some random stranger pulled over and offered me a ride home.) Hence, car.
But one of the quirks of the early-model Prius that I drive is the dreaded turtle. This is a dashboard light (amber, and turtle-shaped) that is meant to appear when something’s up with the hybrid battery; in the past, it’s generally only made an appearance on those rare occasions1 when I’ve run totally out of gas and was proceeding solely on electrical power.2 According to some quick research (i.e. reading web pages), though, the indicator can also shows its… shell?… when the temperatures are 2 3xxtr3m3 for the poor car.
Like, say, a sustained -20°C or so.
So yeah, been seeing the turtle a lot lately. What it’s supposed to indicate is that you shouldn’t do a lot of hard acceleration, since there’s currently issues with the electrical system. Given my past experiences, I was a little bit wild-eyed about it, but since the battery meter says all is well back there, I’m just driving very slowly. (Which is probably for the best, since I’ve noticed before that the old Prius isn’t at its best when accelerating from a stop over packed snow. Slow and easy = the right idea. Hopefully, things will warm up before my scheduled bout of highway driving this weekend.)
[1]: I’ve done it three times. Twice, there was a gas station within about fifty meters. The third time was less fun.
[2]: This is officially considered a Bad Idea, incidentally, though apparently you can mod the new Prii pretty easily to run electric-only for short bursts; this might even be available from the dealer in Europe and Asia. Of course, the newer models don’t have the turtle either, since I guess whatever bugs mine suffers from were worked out shortly thereafter.