My 2013 Uber vehicle died after making a loud noise.

I was driving for Lyft today with all the windows open at about 4PM. I was a block and a half from dropping of my passenger, and I heard what sounded exactly like a firecracker bang go off under the car. From the reverberations off of the parked cars net to me, I am guessing the sound was directly under the battery. The smell reminded me of a firecracker as well.

I was baffled, but nothing seemed wrong, so I kept going. As I was turning left onto the passenger's street, I had no power steering. I was lucky that his street went downhill, and there was a parking space two car-lengths long in front of his house. Then I noticed all the dash lights. The Hybrid battery bar graph was at zero. Once I put it into park, it would not go back into gear (only neutral).



I tinkered with an ODBII adapter I had with me and Torque Pro, but only got two errors: B1000, and some error involving the downstream O2 sensor being low. I tried disconnecting the battery for 5 minutes, no change.

I recall that an overheated inverter might recover briefly if allowed to cool down. I waited, then restarted the car. The ICE came on, then shut off after 20 seconds. A strange whirring noise would come from the vicinity of the AC and ICE water pump while the engine ran. At one point, I saw two bars on the Hybrid battery indicator, but only once.

I checked, and all fluids were at their proper level. No part of the engine compartment was unusually warm either.

Then I called AAA. It took 3.5 hours for the tow truck to arrive. As I said above, I had previously been able to get the car into neutral. Not after 3 hours listening to the radio, and charging my phone.

10 minutes of futile effort of trying to get the car out of the parking space while in park, and it just wasn't working. The street was crowned, and I was too close to the car in front of me. I then turned the car back on, and I luckily, I could get the car in neutral. This made the tow truck driver happy, since he and a neighbor was able to push the car backwards far enough to clear the car in front, while I steered.

By 9:15PM, the car is now sitting at the dealer I trust 15 miles away from home.

No I haven't pulled codes using techstream, since my laptop was at home, and my VCI cable is awol.

Oh and how do I get the PriusChat app on my android phone. Apparently you can't do much on PC with a phone's web browser.

 

Can you decode what you mean by ECU and SRS ECU?

The dealer called, and the diagnosis will cost $280, since it is surely a Hybrid system problem. Surprisingly, they think they will get it looked at today. Also, the car has 102k on it and is on the hairy edge of 96 months. My first thought was hybrid battery or connections to the battery, given the location of the noise. The service advisor told me that the battery warranty is 100k 96 months.

Ouch.

 

From the searches on my phone, I found that PriusChat is no longer on Google Play. The .apk file can be downloaded elsewhere, and manually loaded. That requires turning off a security setting to allow opening of .apk files that did not come from the Google Play store. I found some links to download it, but I kept getting broken links.

 

OK I googled SRS ECU. SRS == airbag.

I have been swapping steering wheel switches between my two cars lately, because I don't have the "Voice Command" button on the left side switch of my Prius v two. I always removed the negative terminal of the 12 volt battery when doing this, since you have to remove the steering wheel airbag to get the switch out. I did this last week to put the "Voice Command" switch back into the 2017 for a trip out of town last weekend.

OK I googled Toyota B1000. There are a lot of hits with B1000/31, which have to do with the SRS system. Torque Pro did not give me any subcode, so I assume from this chart that I have "ECU failure, No Further Information Available".

 

The noise was clearly coming from under the car, based on the echos I heard off the parked cars on the street. The smell was sort of like gunpowder, but came in through the windows, so was outside the car. I recently had the same dealership flash the update to the Inverter as part of a recall. IIRC, that recall was supposed to prevent something like this, or at least improve the limp mode.

There was nothing unusual about the ride that would trigger an airbag, although the gunpowder smell suggests airbag. I was going about 25mph on one of the few streets that does not have potholes when the noise occurred.

I have not had any MIL or other warnings of pending problems whatsoever.

I texted my nephew, who works at a Hybrid shop in Colorado, and he and his co-workers were stumped. The thought of a High Voltage cable breaking or shorting was considered as a possibility. That would explain the Hybrid Battery indicator being zero most of the time.

The ICE did start a few times, but cut out after 20 seconds. This suggests that the Hybrid battery was connected at least intermittently after the bang.

There is hope of a diagnosis by the dealer by the end of the day (6PM EDT).

It is fall in Philadelphia. The outside temperature was a nice 73 degrees. It was a rare day that justified all the windows down.

 

Something that puzzles me is the "O2 sensor signal low" error I believe it was the downstream sensor. Could damage to the "frame wire" be related?

 

Maybe in some neighborhoods in Philly it could have been an IED, but not this one.

I was stranded in my car on a small clean residential street in the Germantown neighborhood. Mostly black working class people. I got numerous offers of help including bottled water and use of their bathrooms. I did use a bathroom of a black couple who were fixing up an apartment for rent. Generally good folks, who appreciate that a rideshare driver is completely comfortable of driving anyone including black people (about 60% of my passengers are black).

There are neighborhoods where an IED might have made sense. On the other side of town, is Kensington. That is ground zero of the Opiod epidemic. Trash everywhere. Homeless zombies everywhere. Kensington is a neighborhood where you have worry about getting attacked by anyone, especially the white people. Drug addiction will do that. My windows would have stayed rolled up, and I would worry if the tow truck driver would show up. I would not have waited 3 hours for AAA to show up, I would just start calling calling tow truck companies to find one that could come quickly.