I have been thinking about what would happen if the size of the battery in the Camry was increased, and even past that what would happen if the battery could be charged by the power grid and not just the ICE.

In watching how my battery provides power to the car, it is very rare that it indicates less than 2 bars missing. About 90% of my driving is done with only one bar missing from the energy screen. So that leads me to believe a higher capacity pack won't really help anything except add more weight to the car.

Now to charging the pack, I would want the energy level in the pack to be low (but not so low as to hurt the pack's life) so it can recieve a charge from the power grid. Since, I would have to really work at keeping the car in ev mode (when I do work at it, I rarly can get it to go under 1/2 battery before the engine runs considerably) what good would that do me?

So how to the plug-in kits allow you to actually use the extra capacity of the battery and not have the ICE just top it off again?