My Prius will not turn off!

Same thing has happened to me twice - dark dash and can't turn the car off. Many people seem to think it's from the cold, but has happened to me both times in warm summer weather.
How much is a new combination meter?

 

^^^
You're likely better off getting it fixed by pEEf. See earlier posts by him.

 

I agree

If you are in the Los Angeles area I can remove yours, install a loaner, send yours out for repair, and re-install yours after the repair.

 

Hi- We have been on vacation and I just saw your post. Our combination meter was replaced under warranty, but I think the bill listed the cost (parts and labor) around $800. That was through our local Toyota dealer and took place in early 2009. We kept that Prius for several more years and the problem did not recur. We traded it on a 2011 model Prius last year.

 

5/5/2013 car has 102K miles, Temp was colder than average the night before got down to 42F this night temp was down to 53F when I decided to go for a 1am drive.I had the same problem tonight my car would not turn off I drove it 6 miles left it running (heater on full blast AC HEATER worked headlamps all functioned turn indicators functioned) for about 15 min it would not respond to normal attempt to power down so I went to find some light to start pulling fuses. I had no speedo absolutely no lights in that area so I had no idea of fuel no idea of any of that the center display did not show how many miles were driven on that tank I had no way of knowing range of the veicle. Wife had parked the vehicle on a full tank so I knew the ICE would run for a very long time if I did not get it to turn off some way. We replaced the 12 volt battery the day before that battery was replaced after 6 years and 100K miles of service we replaced it when the car would not start clearly we should have replaced it long ago but never got around to it. We got a Oriely battery and did not have the stealership do the work Orliely did the removal and install. I am not sure why the car did this but what I did was go under the hood and started pulling fuses until the car would shut off . I pulled the RED 10 fuse about the center of fuses it was a tiny thing and the engine died It acted like it was smothered so I am guessing I pulled the electronic fuel pump. I then put the fuse back in after the car shut off and tried to use the power button to restart the car. It was acting retarded I got instrumentation partially in the center display the ICE would not power up. I drove it half a mile on EV no ICE until the EV power was depleated I coasted into a parking spot. I parked it and some reason it came back to life. The check engine light and the red triangle light stayed on so I drove it across the parking lot to get a suitable park. I went shopping for over an hour and returned to the car it has the speedo working but check engine and big red triangle with exclamation point in the middle lit. Drove 6 miles got home backed the car into my spot and turned it all off normally. I powered back up and played around with park drive and placing the car in nuetral hitting the brake sometimes not IDK what I did to get it to behave it powered down properly started properly the big red light went off so did the amber check engine. IDK what the issue was but I think changing the 12v battery had something to do with it.

 

5/5/2013 My car did everything you mentioned. Also I noticed the seat belt alarm did not work I normally drive with seatbelt I drove off with it disconected and there was no alarm I had the dog in the seat it normally would set the seat belt alarm nothing.

 

I got a "Notice of Warranty extention" on the combo meter in the mail last week from Toyota. Applies to all GEN II Prii. Extends warranty on combo meter to ten years from date vehicle placed in service...unlimited mileage.

 

The symptoms you described indicates that the combination meter in your Prius is failing. There is a warranty extension that should be valid to cover your repairs at no charge. Take your Prius in to a local Toyota dealer and tell them about the combination meter not working properly. The repair generally takes a few days. Toyota should provide a free rental car to you during the repair. When the combo meter is malfunctioning, the Prius will not shut off normally. However, if you will hold down the power button for three seconds the Prius will shut down properly. Please refer to the attached file for more information.

Good luck to you.

Ron

 

Just finished changing transaxle fluid , put my 05 Prius on jacks, got out a funnel put a hose on it, after i drained the fluid I ran hose from funnel on top of engine into transaxle and refilled it with new fluid , easy and cheaper than Toyota dealer,

 

I can confirm that this is true. I finally took mine in for service after reading this. It took about 3 days. I was provided a free rental up to $35/day (Nissan Altima from Hertz). The new display is nice and bright like when my car was new in '07.

The issue occurred off and on for the last 9 months with no patterns. It also first happened after my dealer changed the 12V. I currently have 125k on the car.

Hopefully, the transmission lasts a lot longer. I'm not looking forward to any transaxle issues, as I've had every other issue (water pump failures (both electric and ICE drivetrains), HID headlamps, hybrid battery failure at 93k, etc.).

 

I have the same problem and it is summer in the desert in Joshua Tree. I don't think it is induced by temperature.

 

Hello fellow Prius owners. My 12 cold battery was acting up and I needed jump starts more than once in the past few years with my 08 Prius.

I finally went it to get it changed. I've had the dark dash condition for years that was a issue that I more or less ignored. It could happen when I started the car in a hurry and didn't push on the brake pedal firmly before I started, In other words when the dark dash condition happened, maybe three times out of ten when it happened I was in a rush and likely was pressing the brake down as I was pressing the button. So a partial pressing of the brake pedal might cause the dark dash on my Prius. Other times the weather was almost always just around freezing or a little bit below freezing temperatures outside. The dark dash didn't really bother me much, sometimes it caused me to have to hold the button to turn off the car and other times it would resolve itself as I was driving the car perhaps more than 15 minutes of driving.

During my recent battery replacement last week I decided to report the dark dash condition as it's been a minor problem and annoyance and it's covered under warranty. The dealer looked at it and tested the car. They also did a 100,000 mile service, replacing fluids, and did another repair which was unrelated to the dark dash. And they of course replaced the 12 volt battery.

This took a few days because the computer fix had to match the original miles on the car, so the newer computer or whatever they fix has to be programmed with the odometer readings for the replacement to work.

I received the car and all the changes that were made, wheel alignment, battery fluid change, etc made the car seem like a new car performance wise. It rolled very easily down the road. I was very happy and perhaps a part of that was that my tires were perhaps harder as I hadn't been checking their tire pressure. I have one tire pressure sensor that is aftermarket that won't program correctly so my tire pressure warning light is always on.

The car ran fine for a few days and last night I had a errand to run and pick up dinner for a take home dinner that I'd split between my mom and I.

I stopped and picked up the dinner and then started out on Eureka road near I 75 in Southgate Mochigan. I took a u turn left to get on the road to head toward I 75 for the ride home. Speed limit was 45 and I quickly accelerated because other traffic was approaching as I rolled through a yield sign turn around.

My car speed up with the gas floored quickly up to 45 and then beyond. Although I took my foot off the gas pedal and it returned up with my foot the car kept accelerating uncontrollably as if I had the car floored and my foot was still on the gas.

I pressed down on the regular brake and the car slowed down, but when I removed it the car speeded up again. I pressed the brake a second time and then pressed the gas down and released it again to see if the peddle was somehow stuck, wondering if it was some kind of gas pedal sensor failure and the car still was acting as if it was floored. The car reached speeds of 55 to 57 mph during one of these runaway acceleration events. I pressed on the brake again and was able to slow down and then stop the car at an intersection near an I 75 turn around entrance. I pressed down for a second on the start button and the car would not turn off. I pressed down again and the car turned off, but it had two sets of green lights on the dash blinking on each side of the display. And the park light remained on even though the car seemed to be off and dead.

I turned on the emergency flashers and considered calling the police and not starting the car, perhaps I should have called for a tow. There was a clear path ahead on Eureka and I likely could stop the car again I figured if the same problem happened. I thought. I'd take a risk and start the car.

I started the car and it seemed to run as it would normally run and no runaway accelerations happened.

I moved back the mat in the car as well. It's the newer Toyota mat that was given out I believe when they panicked and said mats were causing the peddle to get stuck. If that was the recall, I think that was one of the things they did. In any case, I know the pedal and spring were modified for the gas pedal issue some years back so whatever pedal issues were supposedly happening, I feel strongly they were not the cause of the runaway thing that happened to me.

I strongly suspect that the dark dash recall fix caused my 08 Prius to be changed for the worse. I'd rather have a dark dash than a car that has a mind of it's own to speed away. I called the dealer, but their service department was closed.

I called Toyota and mentioned this and reported it to them. I gave them as many details as I could recall and even mentioned that k actually pushed and removed my foot from the pedal during the event to verify that the pedal was going down and returning back up.

We will see what happens. I expect Toyota will fix this, and hopefully all will go well. I really love my Prius and have enjoyed it's features over the years and have 109k miles on it. I have to wonder now how bad things might have been had I had a worse system failure as some have had and the brakes didn't work. I can't imagine what would have happened if I would have had to try to use the parking brake to stop it.

But even if the brake works and stops the car, if this kind of thing happens or could it almost seems like an unacceptable risk.

That's really a bummer to.me because I like the car so much and have liked it for such a long time.

I have to wonder what I'll do next and what options I'll have. I am retired and just paid of my car loan. I actually took out another loan on the car at one time because I had so much equity in the car and used that as a temporary loan for something else, and just paid my car off.

I have another vehicle as a backup so I can drive that gas hog which I prefer to park. I'm retired so I don't know about the prospects of trading in this car if I lose faith in it.

Hmm. Kind of difficult to think about the risks there. I know from past tests being a geek that my Prius would do full acceleration from low speeds without pushing the gas pedal all the way down. One could push the pedal less than full and still get full power because there is a physical limit to what the engine and motor can provide. I also had times when the car might accelerate a bit over rough bumps when antilock braking might work on a normal car, losing traction due to potholes and acceleration, it would seem like a pothole might cause a vibration to exist that might cause the motor or engine to speed up instead of a brake stopping one side, as antilock would do. It seemed odd hat the car would do this at times over potholes but this was before the dark dash system or computer was changed out.

Anyway that's an unusual thing that happened to me that seems to be a bad side effect to a fix for the dark dash.

I've heard from another Prius owner that there is some kind of software bug that can cause this that Toyota admits can happen. This is of course something I've heard, but I haven't confirmed that report. I can't imagine that my mat or gas pedal could have caused this as the significant change that happened was the dark dash fix. My 12 volt battery was changed as well. I guess I'll find out in the next few days what will happen.

I opened a case via the phone with Toyota and will contact the dealer where the service happened.

The Ironic thing is I've heard and read about this happening to other owners and it seems like a very rare event. K was a computer analyst before I retired, so I know about computers and had a bit of a pause in thinking about what I'd do as a driver if this ever happened to me.

I'm glad to have read about other stories out there about uncontrolled accelerations. They actually prepared me to deal with my car when it happened to me.

There are a few things that make sense when thinking about the way hybrid cars work, but a few things that also don't make sense from a traditional safety point of view.

When I bought my Prius I didn't really think or understand that the brake was fly by wire and controlled by a computer. It makes sense that they do this, but perhaps a split system, much more expensive but affordable would have been a better design which allowed the brake to function as it does, but also have a pressure induced system that would allow the brake to go into a third mode that is manually connected to a braking system that overrides the computerized brake system. This would create more parts and expense and weight but would be a fail safe in the event the braking computers fail. Supposedly there is something like 42 computers in the Prius and it has redundancy. I wonder if that is safe enough.

The other thing of course is the speed in which one can turn off the computer. If it takes 5 seconds to reboot, well that's a long time to shut it down.

A lot of bad things can happen in five seconds. I can only imagine sideswiping cars on purpose to stop a runaway if the car lost brakes and did a runaway thing and you didn't have five seconds to stop on a side street.

The last thing that of course is strange is the transmission and not having a manual way to get the gearbox into neutral to tow or push the car if the battery dies, meaning it won't start. That is also a pretty big flaw in the hybrid design in my opinion.

That's it for now. It would be really fought to fix all those possible things and have secondary ways around the hybrid design for a very minute set of glitches and problems. That might make the car much more expensive.

I have to wonder if new standards and requirements in design will be needed in the future with the drive by wire and automatically controlled cars that are being designed for the future. I can state that I would never want or accept steering adjustments by computer, because a failure there would be another huge problem.

There is a lot to love about the Prius. The computer controlled unknowns however give me pause toward these new fangled devices. And I was a computer analyst for many years.

 

I had the opposite problem. When I first purchase this 2011 Prius 2 December 28, 2011, I wasn't accustom to driving it. I accidentally pushed the park button while going down the highway at 60 mph. Everything went dead as it does when you park it for the night. I had enough momentum left to coast to the shoulder of the road. I taught that was the end of my Prius. When I went through the procedure for starting up the car it started up normally. I then went on my way as if nothing had happened and there appears to be no damage to the car.

 

tl;dr


Am I reading this right that our combo meters are warranted for 15 years, unlimited miles??

 

I had my display go black on my instrument panel. I had letters to be mailed, so I placed them in front of the instrument panel so I wouldn't forget them.. When I removed the letters the panel came back on normally. The letters apparently blocked the beam .

 

This problem happened to me this morning and it was pretty confusing at first! Luckily I had my smartphone and could consult Priuschat. I shut it off by holding down the power button as recommended by a poster above. The only thing that was different in my experience was when I first got into the car and pressed the power button, I got the key icon on the dash, and the beep, indication that the key wasn't present, when it was actually in my pocket. I took it out of my pocket and put it into the cup holder which is where I normally keep it while I'm driving. I tried starting again, and it started "normally" but for the blackened dashboard. the MFD worked but was very dim at first; it didn't register MPG or anything else, although the batterery usage screen worked normally. When I re-started my car after getting back in from my shopping, it started and ran completely normally. About the cold issue: this past winter is the first I've owned this '07 Prius. I had absolutely no problems enev in the coldest parts of this New England winter. However, it's been spring lately, except for last night when it got down to freezing very quickly. And then the electrical stuff happened this morning. To me, it seems likely that this problem is at least aggravated by the cold weather.

 

There's an extended warranty to cover the issue you have, it's the "blackened dash" sign that says failed combination meter. That part is covered for 9 years so you should be covered. Bring it into Toyota and get it fixed.

 

wow awesome! That's the best news I've heard. Thanks jc91006.