Recall

I don't know if they still have it, but Toyota had an owner's site where you could record what maintenance you did yourself.

 

I didn't think I could enter DIY maintenance on the Toyota Web site; I'll have to investigate. Thanks.

 

So, I'm not a happy camper right now. I took my car in Monday for the dreaded latest recall:

"The involved vehicles were designed to enter a failsafe driving mode in response to certain hybrid system faults. Toyota has found that in rare situations, the vehicle may not enter a failsafe driving mode as intended. If this occurs, the vehicle could lose power and stall. While power steering and braking would remain operational, a vehicle stall while driving at higher speeds could increase the risk of a crash".

Prior to the recall, I have had NO issues with my car. It will be 5 years old in August and I already had plans to replace my 12v battery just to be on the safe side. I was averaging 49mpg and currently have 53k on my car. I do weekly freeway driving (average speed is well above 55mph). Well, since Monday when I brought the car in to be "fixed", now, while I am cruising down the street (40 miles per hour), all of a sudden the enging kicks into the charging mode. Then I notice the main battery is at 2 bars. This has NEVER happened before. My fear is that the recall update has to re-configured or re-learn my driving style. Or worse, its going to be like this forever, therefore messing up my mpg. Either way, I now have to monitor my car closely over the next few days and see it this situation improves. If nothing changes, I will buy a new 12v battery. Just so you know, they so called "inspected" my car and it noted both batteries were in excellent condition. I do not want to go back to the dealership with them trying to find the issue and it costing me unneccessary money.

 

They had my car for 75 min., including doing their standard multi-point check of fluids, etc.. and washing it. No attempt to sell me any additional services.

 

That's arguably just about the opposite of what you now have to do. MPGs watched obsessively over a few days and dozens of miles can naturally vary dramatically (up or down) compared to what you're accustomed to over five years and 53,000 miles, because the denominator is so much smaller. It might take a real effort to just drive the car for a while and not try to make everything you see in the first few days into some kind of portent.

 

Makes sense. I'm paranoid because my past experience with dealerships is the problem doesn't get solved and I spend thousands of dollars. On a side note, over the last couple of days, the issue of the car just charging for no reason has stopped.

 

Do a search, you'll see that this recall will fire up ICE sooner than before. Most likely you got an accumulative update also, the inverter gets more help from ICE when more power and/or speed is needed which reduces the inverter propelling the car by itself.

Disclaimer- this reply may not apply in all situations.

 

It is safe to say if you do a search you will find a number of claims like that. If you look at them closely you'll see they generally suffer from the same difficulty seen here: recent recall customers making hypervigilant short-term 'after' observations and mentally comparing them to longer-term non-hypervigilant recollections from 'before'.

For the longest time that was the only kind of report you could find on subject by searching here. More recently, there has been one report by GG707 claiming observable changes in parameters that can be queried over the diagnostic port. To the best of my knowledge, no one else had reported any such thing until then (and to the best of my knowledge there hasn't been a confirming report since either). But it was at least a start on reporting something more concrete, and that would be a trend worth contributing to, for anyone who can spare the time and would like to help the PriusChat community learn stuff.

The main difference between the kind of reports we've mostly seen here ("hey, I've got 4.91 MPG less on my exact usual route under exactly identical conditions"), and the kind you could publish and hang your hat on, is that a publishable one has not just your inferred value of the change, say "-4.91", but also a level of confidence and a corresponding interval around the value. That's when the reality of the situation sinks in, because a realistic confidence statement under the kinds of conditions that apply here would probably come out something like "well, the center of my CI is at -4.91, and I am 90 percent confident that I neither lost more than 20 MPG nor gained more than 15."

There is no law that says that has to come from people wearing white coats in sparkling lab facilities—all it takes is a lot of data collection, and math that can be looked up—but it does have to come from people willing to that data collection and do that math. You can compute a bare MPG difference even if all you have is one average from before and one from after, but you can't even fill in the formulas for a confidence interval until you have multiple repeated observations on both sides; the math depends on knowing how much variation was normal even before the recall changed anything, and how much is still normal variation after. That means having both 'before' and 'after' data sets that are already divided into lots of repeat observations, the conditions they were made under, and the differences between them.

For the case of measuring MPG in cars by driving them around on roads, the amount of variation that's completely natural is big enough that an honestly-reported confidence interval is not going to come out as narrow as we would hope. How can it be made narrower? Well, by putting a lot more work into data collection, both before and after, or by contributing to some sort of shared PriusChat data set that could get big enough for analysis to really get somewhere. That could happen. But it isn't, at present, what you see when you do a search.

 

Grit, you pretty much nailed it. That is exactly what my car does now, and it didn't before. Thank you for the research, and on a friendly side note, your disclaimer also nails it! LoL

Chapman, I can see all angles now of this recall and the results that can happen. I have had horrible experiences with dealerships. You don't know the things I paid for but didn't have to. I don't even buy new cars from a dealer. I research, go to my credit union for financing, and use a 3rd party for pick up. This way, I avoid the saleman who just wants to unload a good looking car on an unsuspecting person and I avoid the "nice" service manager who can't seem to figure out why my car that I bought from them isn't working. I lost thousands!! and I lots faith and trust in them. Just my experience.

 

5 hours? Mine was just an update to the hybrid computer in less than 45 minutes. What did they do?

 

Sales pitch, tell me about it. The showroom person low-balled my 2015 Pirus 4 (30K miles) - 10K trade i n - and tried to coerce me into buying a brand new car. Even CARVANA gave me better estimate.

 

Look up by the VIN on 2013 Prius and no open Safety Recalls or Service

 

I think recalls were low on the priority for the day. Makes sense. They were busy, but then again, they are always busy.

 

Here's a trick that often works if you want the car back early. Mark on the form when you drop the car off that you will be a "waiter" (one who waits, not one who serves food). In terms of triage, my service writer once told me that people who are waiting for their cars at the dealership get priority over those who are at work/home and the dealership calls when the car is ready. Ones who get a free loaner car from the dealer are the lowest priority.

 

I didn't wait for mine, and it was about 75 min. from when I dropped it off until they called me to say it was ready -- and washed.

 

I got mine done today. Dealer took like 3 hours, I guess they were busy. Driving short distances I didn't do better than 49 MPG. ICE wasn't coming on unexpectedly. I have a 2015 with 75K. Tomorrow I'll do my regular freeway trip in which I average about 54 MPG. We will see...

 

The issue doesn't happen often anymore, but, it does do it. The update is taking care of what might have happened. I just have to get used to it.

 

I have good news to report. MPGs seem unaffected as I am getting very good numbers today. So I'm pleased.

 

So crazy how the matrix of the universe works, I just signed up a day or two ago and saw all the maintenance history on my prius.

I was thinking it would be cool see and have the history on it and a quick search led me to the signup.

Also to confirm, yes you can still add your own maintenance.

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

Had the recall done and driven about 30 miles. Mpg is the same. Seems rarely the ICE stays in a few seconds longer than before. All seems good here.