Prius (Gen 3) :: ICE Turned Off By Tapping Brakes While Keeping Throttle Depressed To Maintain 35 MPH

I've noticed and been experimenting the past 2 days with something strange, at least strange to me. Leaving work each day, I have about 4.5-5 miles of minor down hill grade. It always aggravates me that I can't truly glide on most of this slope because the ICE motor is warming up.

Yesterday I was watching the Eco meter/bar as I was coasting to the first of 2 sharp (15MPH) 90 degree turns, and noticed that as I applied the brakes, the ICE must have turned off because the MPG meter shot up to the top of the scale.

Normally, I'll accelerate to 35-40 MPH, release the throttle and watch the ECO bar go into the charge section of the gage as the MPG meter goes into the 90-100 range. I slowly depress the accelerator, to move the bar back toward the neutral/glide position and as I do, the MPG meter slowly drops to around 40-50 and continues to drop as the speed slowly bleeds off. But as I said, yesterday as I applied the brakes, I noticed the meter went shooting to 100.

So today I played with it and not only was I able to get the ICE to turn off at each of the sharp turns, but after accelerating, as I was going straight after the second turn, I was able to get the ICE to turn off by braking while still keeping the throttle depressed to maintain 35 MPH.

Now I don't have any extra meters to tell me what the engine temp was, so I don't know what stage of warm up the motor was in, but I can tell you that outside temp was about 65, the first turn is about 90 seconds (1/2 mile plus parking lot congestion leaving the school) into my journey and the second turn exactly 1/2 mile on down the road (35 speed limit). Without using the braking trick, my motor will not shut off for gliding until about 6-8 minutes or 2.5-3.5 miles into my drive.

Trick to turn off the ICE? I was able to raise my overall MPG for the 23 mile round trip from 63+ to 64+ MPG today by being able to actually do serious gliding in those first 3 miles.