What happens with no smart key?

Hi everyone,

I recently bought a 2005 dead Prius as a project. It was a tow in DOA to a Toyota dealership and apparently the dealership even gave up on this car. Here's what I've done so far:

1) Bought Bently Publishing repair manual.... not as technical as I was hoping, but it gave me a good idea of the workings of the car.

2) Everything was completely dead, including the little 12V battery in the back, I charged it and still got nothing, no dash lights, no interior lights, nada. Only the hazard flashers would work.

I found two blown fuses in the fuse block under the hood. One was "DOME" and the other was "ABS MAIN 2." I replaced them and the dome fuse has something to do with the cluster because stuff started lighting up. This is with a charger on the battery. The 12V battery is shot and I'm about to go out and replace it

3) Here's the real kicker, the car came with no smartkey. They apparently had only one and it grew legs. The previous owners only had the one smartkey too. I'm going to try and track down who had this car before and see if they might happen to have a key in a drawer somewhere and bribe them to send me the key, but I'm not counting on this. The dealer I got it from gave me a new smart key, but it is not programmed to the car.

What I'm after right now is this, what happens if you have no smart key or an incorrect smart key in the car? Right now I get a door open light, a key light that flashes and a really annoying beeping. This is with the key either in the slot or not and I am aware of the smart key disable under the steering wheel.

4) I need to get the car at least functional enough that I can get it to the dealer so they can do the reset on the immobilizer ECU. I have no power between pins 4 and 16 on the OBD port like it's supposed to. My family has a small repair shop so I have access to a nice Modus scanner, a bunch of tools and a few good mechanics, but none of them have ever tried to repair a hybrid. In theory if I get the OBD port working and talking I should be able to get the immobilizer reset by Toyota right?

5) Here's the one big scarry thing with this car. There's a whole inverter assembly sitting in the back seat of the car when I got it. The one under the hood is there and intact, but apparently this part went bad on this car from what I'm told. The Toyota dealer also claims that they tested the HV battery and it was ok, but how exactly they did this with the car not even turning on I'm not sure. If I can't get anything soon I think I'm going to open up the battery box and put some charge in to the battery manaully so it doesn't go completely dead.

So, any thoughts? I am really hoping to get this car going. Granted it does have 100K miles on it, but the body is in good shape as is the interior, plus it has one of the upper option packages with Nav, JBL speakers, smart key, HID's, side airbags. I think that package means it has stability control too.

Thanks much

 

Thanks for the replies. Yes I've seen the thread on the reset for the immobilizer ECU. The problem I have now is I have no communication at the OBD port or no 12V power for that matter there. I did check all the fuses under the hood and under the dash, all were good but I'll definitely double check.

Patrick,
I saw the Toyota info site, can you just pay for a one day access and download the service manual stuff permanently as say PDF files?

I forgot about the white fusible link box in the under hood fuse box. The car has a new one installed, the old one was sitting on the drivers side floor when I towed the car home. I didn't put my meter on it, but the links all look good, but the plastic was broken where it looked like someone tried prying it out with a screw driver. That is something to consider for sure so thanks, I'll investigate further.

Right now I can't say for sure what's wrong with the car being I have no key to get the car to boot up. As far as why the inverter was replaced is any ones guess at this time. If nothing else if I have two bad inverters maybe a good one could be made out of the two. Is there anyone who rebuilds the inverter modules if needed? From what I've looked it I can't detect any accident damage. I've been around cars enough that I subconsciously look for evidence of body repair (overspray, bad panel gaps etc) and I haven't found any evidence as of yet.

You are probably right on the warning beep, it sounds when I open the door now. If I understand the operation correctly the backup brake power capacitor box by the little 12V battery only charges up while the car is on and running, I'm sure that's drained plus the blown ABS fuse... I'm sure I'll have brake codes if I get the car to start up. The brakes do seem to work and be boosted when I press the pedal. That's a later issue I guess.

I'm thinking, in theory anyway, if I can get the ODB2 port working and I can communicate with the car using our scanner then in theory the Toyota dealer should be able to plug in, tell the immobilizer to reset and then pop the key in and everything should be peachy. I hope anyway.

Regarding the battery pack I built my own EV conversion:
EValbum "dot" com / 667 (it won't let me post a URL yet)
I also have been repairing NEV's, mostly GEM's and Ford Th!nk's, for a couple of years. I'm pretty comfortable around high voltage. I would be using the Manzanita Micro PFC-30 charger in my Saturn to charge the pack. I can manually dial in the voltage and current. It would be monitored during the whole process. As far as I can tell the car has sat around for a while and I just want to put maybe a ~50% charge in it so it doesn't go completely dead and degrade.

125 volts is ~1.34 volts per cell. Say I brought the pack to this voltage and only let it sit there for long enough to put about 2ah in would that be considered safe? Or do you think I'm wasting my time by trying to charge the battery?

No one answered my initial question. If you get in the car with an invalid smart key and press power should I just get a flashing red key light and I also get a yellow key flash when I press power? I'm feeling that that should be about right, but wanted to make sure before I go hunting for the reason there's no power at the ODB port.

Thanks for all the help.

 

Thank you both, sounds like subscribing to Toyota's system on Friday is the ticket then.

I got the new 12V battery in the car yesterday and what an interesting package they use to ship that little sucker from Japan. The battery is wrapped in a plastic bag and inside a little cardboard box, then this is set in a big pile of small wood shavings inside of a much larger box that has grab handles on it.

A reverse jump start would not surprise me at all. I know the car went to at least one auction and with that little 12V battery being dead and the peons not knowing how to jump it who knows. The back of the car was all taken apart when I got it. I don't know if that was for diagnostic by the dealer or for the jump.

I'm just glad to hear that the few lights I am getting are correct. For now I guess I'll try and track down the reason the ODB port doesn't work and work off the assumption of a reverse jump start. Even if I end up having to replace a couple of ECU's or the inverter assembly I'll still be way ahead of the game with this car.

 

Alright, figured I'd post an update as I've finally had some time to dive neck deep in to Prius. I got most of the back of the car disassembled and the pack was still sitting at around 212 volts so a little low, but not to the point that it'll be a problem yet. If I don't make any progress soon I'll give it a little boost charge.

On the up side I think I did make some big headway. My old cheap Radio Shack multimeter has seen better days and I think some of the solder joints inside were fatiguing and sometimes continuity would work and sometimes it wouldn't so I was getting some wrong readings. I used this as an excuse to geek out and buy a nice Fluke 87V multimeter with 0.05% DC volt accuracy .

Anyway, I think I've printed out 50 pages of service manual and wiring diagrams, but I've made a huge discovery.... the interior fuse panel doesn't have any power so that explains A LOT. The other thing I discovered was someone wanted the power outlet to have power all the time so they spliced power in to the OBD fuse circuit so I don't know if that could have caused the whole problem, but I can see it being something bad. I haven't had time to mess with it much, but now I definitely have something to go off of and figure out why there is no power to the interior fuse panel. As I had mentioned before the fusible link box on the under the hood fuse panel had been replaced, I found the old one in the passenger seat, but it was still good. The wiring diagram shows a white wire going to the interior fuse panel from the under the hood fuse panel so I wonder if maybe there was some fusible link wire in there somewhere, I'll have to track it down. I have most of the lower dash disassembled to check all of this out. I suppose the bigger question is why did whatever originally blow?

Anyway, I'm cautiously optimistic that if I get power to the interior fuse panel that I should suddenly have a lot more stuff start working. If I can get the car to talk to my scanner then I should be able to have Toyota reset my immobilizer at which point I can make some real headway. Everything else looks like it's all there.

Thoughts?

 

Think I got it now.... at least maybe. In my efforts to find out why I had no power to the internal fuse box I traced it back to the under hood fuse box. I had glanced at the fusible link block and was certain they all looked good. Well I didn't look close enough. The main 100A DC/DC fusible link was melted just barely. I managed to solder a few strands of copper wire across the broken link (it'll melt way before 100A) and now I have power inside the car. A lot of stuff is working now which wasn't before, I have brake lights and the interior illumination all works plus I have 12 volt power at the OBD plug!

Next on my agenda, I'm going to go snag our scanner from the shop and see if I can get it to talk to the car. So far nothing else has blown, but I'm now more than ever suspecting I'm going to have to replace the inverter box under the hood, but if I can get the immobilizer reset and a key programmed to the car I'm just going to try powering it up and see what happens. Worst case scenario I'll end up where I was before.

The main battery is also getting down around nominal voltage so I think I'm going to go ahead and give it a little boost charge to be on the safe side.

Thoughts?

 

From what I can tell that fusible link box is about $100 so I'm not going to risk burning a $100 bill. The few strands of wire I have across it will act as a temporary fusible link.

I brought our Snap On Modis scanner home today and I think I may have it. None of the engine stuff would work because it would tell me I had to have the key on for it to communicate (I have no working key). I went in to the body ecu stuff and I had full access to that. I was able to make the door locks lock and unlock, got the rear hatch to unlock, made the interior lights come on and off, I could even get the HID headlights to go high and low beams and there was even a setting to make the hazard flashers some on. Additionally I was able to get the immobilizer light on the dash to go out, stay on solid or blink as it's been doing.

I also for the first time heard the hydraulic brake booster pump working when I hit the brake.

At this point I'm cautiously optimistic that I'm most of the way there as far as getting the car ready to accept an immobilizer reset from Toyota. My scanner doesn't have any sort of module for the immobilizer so I suppose I really won't know for certain until I can get someone to plug it in to TIS. I'm going to talk with a Toyota mechanic tomorrow possibly and see if they feel the same about it.

 

Thanks for the ideas guys. I'm actually thinking now I might actually have a heavy duty fuse holder for the large blade style automotive fuses and probably some 50 or 60A fuses somewhere so I suppose that would also be a valid temporary and cheap solution for trouble shooting. I have absolutely no ambitions of turning any sort of heating devices on right now. Phoenix is currently experiencing unseasonably cool weather where we are only getting in to the low 100's during the last few days.

 

It's at the dealership right now. Here's to keeping my fingers crossed.

I put some charge in to the battery last night. Here are some pictures:

Initial battery voltage was 209.4 which isn't half bad considering that it's sat for 6 months in the heat.


This is the temporary charge setup.



On the bottom left I have ac power coming in through a Kill-a-watt meter to monitor what I put in and also prevents me from tripping the breaker by cranking the charger too high. In the middle is the Manzanita Micro PFC-30 charger , from there DC power goes through the red and black wires to some well taped up alligator clips. I monitored the charge and just charged until the voltage came up to 230 volts. On the AC side it only took .14 kwh to get there and considering the charger is ~90% efficient this would be only about 1/2 of an amp hour to the pack. The voltage dropped to the mid 220's after it sat over night so I suppose it's doing fine.

 

Well, no dice. No communications with the rest of the car when they plugged in so I'm back to stage 1 here. This car has apparently been to this dealer several times in the past and has a history there. They told me that when the car ran, and it was intermittent, that the transaxle was very loud and it had had its inverter replaced there (explains the extra in the back seat).

I'm getting discouraged, but I think I'm going to give it one last try here and see what I can come up with. Not having a key is really standing in my way I think. I think the next best step is to get in to the front of the car and do a good inspection and see just how bad the accident damage was on this thing and really take a good look at the wiring harness. From there if I still haven't given up the whole dash is coming off and I'm going to check the power at all the ECU's. Unfortunately I'm going back to school on Monday so I might not have very much time to work on it.

Anyone want to buy a parts car?