Tran problem

Hi Combsad7,

The car will not go into gear if any of the doors are ajar, or one of the door switches is not working correctly.

Its premature to assume this on my part, but that is most likely what happened.

 

Interesting - assuming that you had depressed the brake pedal when attempting to shift, my guess is that the brake pedal light switch has failed or is out of adjustment.

It must not have been easy to pull the Prius up onto the flat bed while the transaxle remained in P.

 

Hi All,

I had forgotten about the brake pedal/power-on button thing. I did that too when I first had the car. My assumption at the time was I was doing something wrong, not the car was broken. And just fiddled around until I got the car to work. Later I found out I had forgotten to press the brake peddle.

Hschuck, I will have to double check my 2006. I do remember the beeping hysterics the car makes when one starts it with a door open. But do not remember actually trying to put the car in gear with all that noise going on.

Once the car is on, and one opens a door, that is another thing. They do not want it to go out of gear, while driving down the road, and somebody should pop a door open accidentally.

 

OK, this indicates that the brake switch is properly adjusted. Hence, the problem is either with the shift selector lever, the hybrid vehicle ECU, the transmission control ECU, or the shift control actuator assembly that physically locks the transaxle.

Since you did not see any warning lights, this probably means no DTC were logged. You indicated that the green LED in the Park switch remained turned on. (If the LED was blinking, that would signify a malfunction detected by the system.)

My guess is that the shift selector lever failed; please let us know the outcome.

 

I've had a situation once or twice where I have been a bit quick with the power button and not hit the brake until I was already touching the power button, also very brief touch of power button and it seems to trick the system. It wont go into gear and it wont turn off. I needed to hold the power button in to shut it down, the way you force a frozen PC to shut down then reboot it and all was fine.

Did you have trouble shutting it down after this happened?

 

Pure, unadulterated speculation since I do not have an NHW20: could the parking paw fail and/or been overloaded? If you put the car in "Park" on a slope, in theory, a steep enough slope could "lock" the parking paw and the motor might have a little trouble getting it disengaged. Alternatively, a parking paw sensor might fail and thus not let the car go into any 'gear.' ... Just my wandering imagination as I wait for the aspirin to kick in.

Bob Wilson

 

I believe the brake pedal switch assembly has two switches in one unit. One switch runs the brake lights, the other tells the ECU that the brake pedal is pushed. It's possible for one to fail while the other still works.

Tom

 

Hi Tom,

Cruise control-equipped Prius have a two-part brake pedal switch. I understand that the second switch is used to tell the hybrid vehicle ECU when to disengage the cruise function.

Base Prius w/o cruise control only have one brake pedal switch, so that switch performs double duty regarding brake lights and signaling that it is OK to make the Prius READY.

 

Ah, that makes sense. I've never looked closely at a base model.

It should be a quick test to see if it's a bad switch, but it sounds like that's not the case this time.

Tom

 

Which dealer did you go to?