08 model. 30000mi. After warming up, it occasionally repeatedly slips from drive to neutral. It then won't stay in drive unless I manually hold it in drive. It will occasionally stay in B but not always. The D and B backlight also disappears occasionally. After holding it in D for at least a couple of minutes and maintaining speed, it will again grab D. Happens in town and highway. I've taken it to Toyota twice but they say since they can't reproduce the event they can't offer a fix.
Make sure that they have documented your visits. Otherwise they'll might suddenly be able to recreate the problem once you roll over to 36,001...
They need to take a look at the shifter signals going back into the hybrid ECU, particularly the "select" set of lines. Sounds like something is falsely telling the ECU that the lever has slid over to the left end, which in the absence of the up or down "shift" signals means you wanted N. Might be the shifter unit itself -- not unheard of as a problem over time. . _H*
I agree that the shifter unit is the likely culprit. I attached a couple of photos showing you what a new one looks like as well as the spot in the dashboard where the shifter lives.
If they can't reproduce a problem in the "select" set of lines and don't offer to replace the shifter, I won't get a fix from Toyota.
How often does it happen susie? Could you wait until it's playing up and then drive straight to the dealer. BTW. Probably unrelated as this was a "jumping out of reverse into neutral" issue rather than from drive to neutral as in your case. But anyway I remember reading a problem that someone here once had that turned out to have an amusing conclusion. As said their problem was that the car wouldn't "hold reverse" and kept jumping to N. It turned out that they had chosen their shift lever as the ideal place to hang a small rubbish bag, they removed the bag and low and behold problem fixed. True story.
