I wanted to stop in and say so long to my priuschat friends. Many of you helped me tremendously (bisco, dorunron just to name a couple -- many more) and this forum is awesome. Back in December I sold my '05 Prius and bought a '13 Nissan Leaf. It was bittersweet because I did love my Prius and had been through a lot with it but was dying to go EV. Thanks again to you all!
Thanks! I may do a write up because I had a hard time finding real-world Prius to Leaf experiences before I went through with it.
Hi jefe. Can you give us a final update on how your replacement (rebuilt) HV battery experience turned out. If I recall correctly, you had an early (but just out of warranty) HV battery failure, and you couldn't get much help from Toyota so ended up going with a Dorman battery. You then had an early failure (under 3 months) on the Dorman, but at least they made good with their warranty and replaced it for you. Just wondering what was the final outcome of that whole experience. Did the Doorman battery ultimately turn out ok and function well up to when you sold the car? Thanks.
My first replacement was a bright red Re-involt battery. That battery seemed to work great for a few months but demonstrated problems fairly quickly. I knew it was failing, but wasn't getting the right combinations of codes. Finally I did and they agreed to replace it. The replacement for it was a Dorman, right about the time that the guy who started Re-involt sold to them and sold his shop to a previous coworker. A couple of things I remember about that experience are A) the new owner, while gracious in performing the work, went out of his way to tell me that he was doing so for free because Dorman wasn't paying for labor and B) Dorman never gave any trouble at all in replacing the Re-Involt battery. The final battery was working great. I sold the car @ 178K miles and had no reason to believe the Dorman battery was going to be anything but solid. I started having other weird issues that made me a little nervous about keeping the Prius. Once I started up and drove for a little bit before I realized that my car was actually not in Ready and the dash lights were black. The car was started and moving but by appearance, it was not on. It was difficult to get it to shut down too. It was a one-time occurrence but it happened at a time where i had the Leaf bug anyway. I took a hit on the sale of the Prius, mostly due to the fact that gas is less than $2/gal here in Raleigh, NC. But on the other hand, I got a killer deal on the Leaf. Overall, to answer your question, I have all confidence that the replacement battery from Dorman was going to last for quite a while.
Thanks for the info jefe. Hmm, that sounds a lot like the combination meter problem. Apparently this was a not too uncommon and often intermittent issue. I think they even put out a TSB and got an extended warranty in place for that particular failure.
Thought about this some more and I think, even though the Dorman battery performed well, if I had to do it all over again, I think I would go with a new battery from Toyota. I was quoted $3000 from a local dealership, which was only about $800 more than I paid Re-Involt. Not sure what the prices are now, I imagine the rebuilt batteries have dropped quite a bit since then, and maybe the OEM ones have dropped only a little.
