Airbag light on?

I can only help with these two, so no help for your SRS q.

The B1421 is a live sensor reading, and yes your car does have one (front LHS on the dash by the windshield), all it means is that it is a dull day. I bet you're inside. If it is working correctly and you take the car outside and into bright sunlight you will see the DTC disappear. So, it is nothing to worry about unless it stays on in bright sunlight.

Yes, you can put the car in READY and yes, it will most probably complete the tests it needs and present you with the results.

hope this helps (Hope That Helps).

 

The 2G has a solar sensor mounted in the dashboard to help the automatic AC function decide how much cooling is required. That DTC routinely comes on when the car is parked in a dark area, don't worry about it.

B1801 and B1811 mean that there is a bad connection between the driver's airbag and the SRS ECU. Usually this is caused by a spiral cable failure in the steering wheel assembly. You probably have the SRS warning light icon on, which is a person next to a circle.

The reason the engine ECU shows as incomplete is because you have not driven the car sufficiently since the 12V battery was disconnected or the DTC were cleared. Once you have logged sufficient city and highway driving, that warning will go away. The purpose of that is to ensure that sufficient runtime has been logged before an emissions test is performed.

Yes, after Mini VCI has established communications with the Prius, you can make the car READY so that you can see the parameters with the engine running. You can drive around with the laptop connected and accumulate a history of various parameters.

 

If the spiral cable is in good shape, other possibilities include the airbag itself is faulty, or the SRS ECU, or the wiring harness between the spiral cable and the SRS ECU.

Do you have reason to believe the car had been in an accident previously?

 

Yes.

If you want to DIY troubleshoot the root cause of the fault code using your digital multimeter, I suggest you subscribe to techinfo.toyota.com for access to the troubleshooting tree and electrical wiring diagram relevant to this problem. Good luck.

 

Pay someone an extortionate amount to do it for you -- and then forever wonder if they are doing it correctly. Haha.

 

You might be onto something here. I recently replaced my clockspring with a cheapo Chinese version off eBay and I did have a little issue getting the pins in to the sockets. If they were forced, one could be bent over and not making contact. Take the connectors apart and carefully inspect the pins. As I remember, the SRS pins were more robust and I didn't have that problem them them, but it's something to check anyway.

 

Hmm, if you can test stuff for continuity and understand what you're doing, you've got pretty much the same skill set you need to read wiring diagrams, you might be selling yourself short.

The connectors on your airbag may look different from those in the second video you linked (they do in mine, anyway, but I don't know if they changed for your generation). They will have a shorting mechanism, though, just as that guy pointed out. I was surprised he didn't mention the reason airbag connectors have a shorting mechanism (when pretty much nothing else in the car does), since it is to make sure natural static discharges, other random voltages, etc., will not deploy the airbag while you are handling it. Once you start messing with that shorting bar in the process of trying to take a measurement, you aren't protected from that. Haha.

I also noticed he had the airbag on the counter bag-side-down, steel-side-up, while he was disabling the safety, probing it with a voltage source, and leaning his face over it. Bag-side-down means the steel side gets launched in case of deployment.

When we suggest you look at the manuals and wiring diagrams, it really is because we want to help you, and it just isn't practical to learn everything you need to keep yourself healthy from a few off the cuff forum posts.

-Chap

 

On the car side. The pins on the new cable housing were lighter gauge wire and slightly misaligned. It took a little fiddling with a small screwdriver to get the harness to plug in correctly. The SRS pins were in better shape and there are redundant pins and conductors, so I doubt that's the problem for the OP, but it's worth looking at if it's being taken apart anyway.

To the OP, be very careful touching the airbag terminals with anything. By the way, I'm sure you're joking about a dog kennel, but realistically that might just add shrapnel to the mix! I saw plenty of crashes and some demos when I was a firefighter/EMT and I really respect those things.

 

Be careful with the cheap knockoff clocksprings. I am on my 3rd one. I bought it from a seller on eBay that offered a lifetime warranty. And the 3rd one just malfunctioned. They seem to last about 6 months. Then, the airbag light turns on. Every single one was like that.

 

HDuncan, I won't assume that the previous owner knew exactly what caused the airbag light. It could have been tripped by just sticking an umbrella under either of the front seats. I have read on one of these posts that it is common for the light to go off when the wires and connections have been jostled under the seats. With the car off, just gently giggle them (under both seats) and turn the car on and see if the light goes off. If not, repeat a few times.