yesterday while driving on the freeway in EV mode, my PIP (one of the first delivered to the states) flashed the "Check Hybrid System - Stop the vehicle in a safe place" message. i was near my house so i just went home. my SG2 showed code P0C3E, which is apparently an inverter overtemperature code. took it to the dealer this morning and they just informed me that the car needs a new inverter, but no other details… "internal fault" is what he said. while googling, i found this recall notice: Green Car Congress: Toyota recalling about 701,000 Gen 3 Prius vehicles in US over software issue in inverter assembly that doesn't talk specifically about the PIP and implies that it is a software problem, but goes on to say if the car is in a fault condition the inverter will be replaced. of course, it's possible that a software problem leads to hardware damage. the car has only about 10k miles, and about 6k of them are EV mode, so i suppose the inverter has had a workout in it's short life. regardless if toyota is going to sell a plug-in vehicle then it should be possible to run on EV 100% of the time. i'm a little disappointed and hope that this is a defect rather than a design flaw. rob
Sorry your having a problem! The plug-in is not in the recall. I have over 10K in all EV no problems, so I'm assuming yours is a unusual case. Good luck and let us know how things turn out.
This is fortunately one of those things which would be covered under the 150K mile "emission systems" warranty in CARB states on the HV components.
There appears to be a small number of 2012 PIP that had an Inverter issue with DTC P0C3E / Inf 628 "Temperature calculated by power management control ECU and actual temperature are different for 10 seconds or more". This is due to a disagreement between temp sensors internal to the inverter, and does not necessarily mean that there was an overheat condition. Remedy was replacing the inverter assembly. I believe that you should have no further issues. It is unrelated to SSC-E0E recall which involves reprogramming to better protect the power electronics.
whoops, network problems -> double post. shoot, there are good responses in both threads. maybe a mod can merge them. anyway thanks for that info, that's good to know. the car did continue to operate normally after the code was thrown, so it does sound very different than the recall. anyway that's what they are going to do, replace the entire inverter assembly. rob
I think it safe to assume that the old one is not just going to be scrapped. It will go back to Toyota, where they will recertify it to be sent out to the next person who has a failure.
well if it is just a bad temperature sensor, and it's in such a place that corporate can't expect random dealerships to actually repair the inverter on-site, then no big deal, that's the right course of action.
I would think that very little in the HV system is repairable by the dealer. It just wouldn't be economically feasible for the specialized tools and that kind of specialized training to be available at every dealership. Just send these exotic items to a central repair facility where they have the expensive tools and specially trained techs.
alright - dealer replaced my inverter under warranty. unfortunately the trip computers were reset and i lost all my history. we'll see how it goes.
It is interesting how important the data store is to prius owners. Just as hard drive data is important to preserve across service of a laptop, you would think that Toyota would take define maintenance procedures to preserve trip data across service responses. Happy rabid customers have got to be a financial benefit.
I'm a computer guy, and one of the marketing memes now is the "Internet of Things". I rather expect that over the next decade, the "getting it out" is going to get very much better, as it becomes possible for the car to tell the house that I'm on the driveway and it should turn on the heat. Things are going to change.
With things like the network-enabled Nest thermostat, that is not too far fetched. It's just a matter of putting the pieces together.
