I have a 2005 Prius and when I turned the car on today, the MID showed the normal Prius screen that always appears for a few seconds when starting up. Then it showed energy monitor screen, but faded out and it appeared to restart again (general Prius screen) before returning to the energy monitor. I pressed to buttons to get to the info, climate, or audio screen and none of them worked. I also used the buttons on the steering wheel. The MID continued to turn on and turn off. Even when I was not pressing any buttons, it still consistently made the beeping sounds that you hear when a button is pushed even though the screen was not changing. Sometimes when the MID would turn back on, the colors would not be normal and misc. symbols would pop up on the screen for a second. Has anyone else had this problem? Any ideas about what could be wrong?
Try to find pEEf (A California Engineer) on these discussion groups. He has the expertise to help you. The Hobbit is another resource who could help as is: Plug In Hybrid Electric Vehicle PHEV - Talk to Steve (Indianapolis) JeffD
I ended taking my Prius to the Toyota dealer and they told me that I needed a whole new MID. This would have costed over $5000. I obviously did not want to have to pay that much since my car is only worth $10,000. I made arrangements to send the MID out to Indiana to be fixed (see dogfriend's link). Before I did spend the $300 to get it fixed, I went to another repair shop. Apparently there was only a loose connection that needed to be fixed for $20 and my Prius was not one of those with MID screen problem. The Toyota dealership evidently skipped the first step that was listed in the technical service bulletin for identifying if the MID screen was broken. So glad that I went to get a second opinion and that there were no major problems!
On the second gen, the proper term for the color touchscreen LCD in the center is MFD (at least here on Priuschat), not MID.