Inverter Failure Recall

you probably need tech stream scanner, and check the 12v health

 

Check the date of the codes if they were stored prior to the software fix. Hoping it was the tpms ID 3 that set off the CELs and all other codes are before the software fix.

 

Did they tell you what the issue was?

 

So Toyota will foot the 2 grand bill?

 

What's the history (geographic / use) history of your car?

 

Thankfully!

The IPM in my 2010 with only 75500 miles on it died yesterday, 01/23/20. The thing died in Charlotte, four miles from the nearest dealer. I live in High Point (60+ miles away). They are fixing it now...


— Bill Burkholder

 

There have been two software patches for the inverter. Looking through my receipt book, documents sent to me by Toyota Canada:

March 2014
SOSH-230-1A

My undertanding of this one: there was concerns that hard/sudden accelerations demands could cause some welds in the circuitry to fail. The software update is to make the surge come on a little more gradually.

January 2019
SOSH-R66-1A

This time, the concern was that in event of invert failure you would be left stranded, sometimes. Software update to fix this.

 

We had the same two recalls in the US, only with different names: E0E for the earlier one, J0V for the later.

E0E changed the programming that switches the transistors in the IPMs, and a close reading of the defect information report for that one differs somewhat from the usual PriusChat story about it. There was a problem involving solder not staying nicely annealed if it got heated and then cooled too quickly, and there are a lot of armchair engineers on PriusChat who have decided the programming change must have been a power limit to reduce the heating. Which of course is so not the first thing I would try for solving a too-fast-cooling problem. But, you know, we're PriusChatters, and Toyota only has engineers, so they have to make do somehow.

The J0V recall was a bit of an interesting story. Mostly, it's about correcting one corner case in the programming where the failure of an IPM transistor would leave you in power-off instead of limp-home. (And a really obscure corner case too: if the transistor happened to fail at just the right instant, under just the right current, that the sudden change in current flow produced an interference spike picked up on a completely different part of the circuit and triggering the shutdown programming! Try predicting that one before it happens....)

But there was another part of the J0V story. It seemed that some fraction of cars that had the E0E recall done still ended up having crunchy-solder problems anyway. And the reason turned out kind of embarrassing; a low-five-figures number of cars that had the E0E recall "done" in fact had not had all of the programming reflashed. Why? Um ... an editorial goof in the instructions that were handed out to the dealer techs doing the work. Several different places in the instructions had all the correct steps, but there was one section where one step was missing, so if a tech got to the point of having done several cars and feeling pretty familiar, and paying a little less attention to the instructions as a whole but just kind of skimming along, they could end up leaving out that step.

So the J0V recall did also involve making sure that all the reflashing that was supposed to happen in E0E really got done (they developed a whole new module for Techstream that checks for the needed updates itself, and reports back to the mother ship that they've really been done. Somebody really didn't want to hear any more stories about updates getting missed!).

 

I was 1100 miles from home when mine went out.

 

I got a free fix and free rental car. I drove home to High Point and came back the next day. Hendrick Toyota of Concord was very apologetic on behalf of Toyota... especially since my car had had all the recalls done previously and it still blew a power transistor in the inverter.

All is fine, now, we hope.


— Bill Burkholder