Limp mode

Has anyone heard of the PHEV going into limp mode? Was speaking to a dealer earlier this week and he mentioned this. It is not in the manual.

Apparently if you use EV mode going up a steep long hill, the car will go into limp mode as the engine will not start up. Then you can only drive at a maximum of 60 kph. How you get out of limp mode, he did not say.

To me that is exactly the situation where the opposite will happen, the ICE will automatically start when you have the accelerator buried enough because of the steepness of the hill..

But if you've approached the hill with insufficient remaining cbarge, the charge might run out and you would then "limp" up the hill with only the ICE, instead of EV plus ICE.

Am I correct in thinking that true "limp mode" will only occur if both the drive battery is fully depleted (i.e on it's reserve capacity), and there's no fuel for the ICE to run? Has anyone encountered this in everyday driving? I think someone on here forced it somehow, but can't find it now.

The car has an emergency low-battery mode, when demanding more power than it can sustain, eg. driving uphill at speed pulling a heavy caravan and the battery approaching its absolute minimum state of charge. First it will give a "reduced power" warning on the dashboard and nothing else. If you back up on the accelerator a bit, it will disappear again, otherwise the car will reduce power to divert charge to the battery. If that is not sufficient, it will go into "turtle" mode, display a turtle icon and divert maximum charging power to the battery leaving only a minimal amount to propel the car at low speed. As soon as the unsustainable situation is resolved i.e. you are at the top of the hill, it will charge up the battery to its normal operating minimum level and resume normal operation. Obviously it can happen in any heavy-load situation, but it is a rare occurence. I only saw the "reduced power" warning once in 140.000 km, when driving up a long motorway incline at 160kph in a fully packed car with a skibox on top into a strong headwind.
It is one of the reasons that I run on "charge" at higher motorway speeds to keep the battery topped up as much as possible.

OOOOOOH! Jaapv is psychic. He answered my question as I was writing it.