I have a 2008 prius touring. I drove home from work yesterday evening with no issues at all. I went to leave for work this morning my car unlocked, I put my foot on the brake, pressed the start button and the dash lights came on but nothing else tried to turn off the car and that didn't work. it was like nothing had power. The dash lights eventually went out but my nothing would function. Please Help!
x2....... Experienced something very similar with a 2005 I just purchased. Car sat for 5 days before I had a chance to work on it. Battery was at 9 volts.
I'm not sure hold old the battery is. It was in the car when I bought it used 3 years ago this May. I will be taking it out soon and trying to slow charge it to see if it'll hold a charge
So I took the battery out and put it on a trickle charger and immediately it read it the green and shortly after showed fully charged.
That’s to bad that means it’s not the 12 volt battery. When this happens to a Prius it logs a lot of trouble codes that will tell you exactly what it’s unhappy about. Much time and money and consternation can be be done chasing a supposed issue. Auto parts stores free obd tests from what I see on this forum are unable to pull hybrid codes. Best place for codes read is the dealer that costs $145 in my town. Plus a tow. Get all the codes in writing and post them back here before you ok them to go anything. If you don’t need the car fast use the search forum button up top and search Techstream Which is the software used to read the codes. Lots of Cheaper alternatives to decode the codes but cost time. Good luck.
This is not necessarily true. Don't just arbitrarily trust the green light on a slow charger/maintainer. I also used a 1.5 amp slow charger and had to restart the charge about 4 times because (I'm assuming) the voltage was so low it was triggering false indications of being fully charged after only about 15 minutes of charging. After the fourth start it stayed charging and didn't turn green until during the night. I had started around noon, as I was pulling the interior out to remove the HV battery. And curiosity got the better of me. I went to look at my slow charger. It's a Schumacher XM1-5-CA. It's a 6v/12v automatic charger. Apparently if the voltage is low enough on a 12v battery, it assumes the battery is a 6v battery and that's what causes it to give a false indication of fully charged. Maybe the OPs charger is similar?
If the battery that normally takes 10 hours to charge, completes the charge in 2 hours, then the battery is bad.
I decided to take it to Auto zone to test the battery it was only reading a 26% charge. I'm assuming I was getting false reading on the charger. They were able to charge it up for me and my car is running perfectly again!! Thanks so much to everyone for the help!!!
great! i would get a volt meter and keep an eye on it, so you don't get stranded. prius battery is usually damaged to some extent after deep discharge, especially as they age.
I keep a small lithium battery "jump pack" in all of my cars, the Prius only needs a small one since there is no starter. Here is an inexpensive one on Amazon, as an example.
Great idea ITB. I have a couple of regular, heavy lead acid battery options (a small 'garden,' think golf cart, battery and a cheap booster pack), but I take them out of the car most of the time as they are heavy to lug about. The lithium battery pack might be a bit of a pain to keep charged, but a lot less mass.
Lithium ion batteries loose very little charge sitting around, they are perfect for this purpose (except for that bursting into flames issue they sometimes have )
