Help! Car died after battery replacement. Dealer now claiming "out of gas"!

Well, it is impossible to tell but, the code they gave you does have as one of the symptoms out of fuel. It also does not have anything related directly to the HV battery.

I can (regrettably) tell you one thing from my experience with the Prius guess (gas) guage. I have run out of gas with 2 pips left before. Luckily, I was about 100 feet from a gas station when it happened. I was driving when the car suddenly died and all the warning lights popped up (CEL, Triangle etc). The first thing I thought was the battery finally went kaput on me. I pulled into the gas station under battery power, trying to decide what to do and noticed I only had two pips on the guage so I decided to just try to put gas in it. I filled it up and wa-la, it started, all but the CEL disappeared and the car ran fine. I drove it home with no issues and eventually, the CEL went away.

My point is that its not unheard of to run out of gas with 2 pips displayed.

PS: The story about the HD pictures of the TB to the technician is awesome. I would have loved to have seen the look on that guys face. Way to go. I love it!!!!!

 

It def seems silly that the lights are the same but, that is the case. And... trust me, it took me a long time of sitting in my car at the gas station b4 I decided to gas up.

I know the fuel consumption doesn't add up but, at this point, that seems the best explanation for it (esp. if the car runs great after adding fuel and you don't have future problems with it).

 

I've never been able to get 10 gallons in my cars and I have 3 of them to test. On all my cars from 06 - 2010, I'll be lucky to get 8.5 gallons when I fill up with 1 or 2 pips remaining. Many times the pump will stop before it gets to 8 gallons.

I find this quite frustrating as I often read people getting 450-500 miles per fill up. With all my cars, I'll be lucky to get 400 miles before I have to fill up, all averaging around 45 mpg (based on the MFD's measurements).

So in your situation of getting 7.6 gallons into your car.....sounds like what I'm used to.

 

I know that we don't have bladders here in Europe, but I got a little over 11us gallons the week before last. The bladder must really restrict capacity

 

Have you had any other services done recently, oil change in particular? Overfilled oil can cause the issues you described.

 

Hi Tarawow, can you share the name of the indie shop in L.A. that you're happy with? I also use Marina del Rey for regular maintenance but am annoyed they wanted $110 to clean the MAF sensor plus $175 for a "decarbon cleaning" at 55,000 miles. Thank you!

 

Wow, $285 dollars for those services? I would do it for $140 and make a house call. It's a 10 minute job.

 

Yep, that's SoCal for you. I did the MAF sensor cleaning myself (just $7 for the bottle of cleaner) but don't know what a "decarbon cleaning" is. It's not in the maintenance schedule, so I had them skip it.

 

That's a fancy word for throttle body cleaning and possibly a bottle of gas treatment. If they called it anything else, they wouldn't be able to charge you $175. Damn these dealers are getting creative.

 

Wow, that's good to know. Thank you! I can clean the throttle body myself too and save some more $.

 

You probably won't need to do the throttle body cleaning at your mileage. Even the MAF cleaning you did was probably not necessary, it probably looked the same after you cleaned it. No difference cause it was still free from carbon deposits.

 

Wait, what? Back up!

How long is the warranty on the hybrid battery?? I've been dreading that its failure may be imminent (almost 250k on my '05). No signs of failure so far and milage is still good, but I assume it's just going to up and quit on me one day. If it's gonna fail, when do I want it to fail by??

 

The warranty is 8 years/100K miles, whichever comes first. Your battery is past-due to die and when it does, you'll get to pay for a replacement.

The OP lives in California where the warranty is 10 years/150K miles.

 

Ah, thanks Patrick. Didn't know CA had a different warranty.