Last week when driving my 08 Prius the check engine and red triangle of death came on. Drove the car home but as I got to my street it starting driving strangely like the transmission was slipping. On my Dr Prius app I saw one of the banks in the hybrid battery had failed. I had this same issue back in Jun 2019 and replaced 2 cells myself and reconditioned all 28 cells. This time I bought 10 used cells off eBay, reconditioned all 38 cells and used the best 28 cells with the highest mAh capacity, all over 5000 mAh. Today I put the hybrid battery pack back in the car and upon starting it up the check engine and death triangle lights were still on. I checked the Dr Prius app and the hybrid pack now appears to be fine, but the car will not go into drive or reverse, only neutral or park. The engine never comes on. I tried hooking on my generic code reader and it says no codes found. I also have a wifi ELM 327 and Toad Scan pc software and again found no codes on any of the three computers that I can connect to. The starting battery is relatively new and is showing 12.3 volts. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting the battery to see if the codes will clear but no help. Does anyone have any idea what I can do besides having it towed to a dealer? I'm wondering if maybe the transmission is throwing a code, is there anyway to check that?
Here's a photo of the dash, all the lights remain on including traction control, (!), ABS, VSC, check engine and red triangle.
OR...….check that this plug is connected...it often gets forgotten and will make the car think the safety disconnect is not installed
If there are lights on, there are codes. To which ECUs can you connect? Did you clear all the codes before starting the car? In any case, use your generic reader and do a global clear all codes, then see where you are.
Yes I have the orange safety clip and all 3 white plugs back in correctly. I never disconnected that small black one by the orange clip. When I use my generic scanner it finds no fault codes. When I use my Toad Scan software it brings up three computers it can connect to, ECU$E8, EA, and EB. None show any active, stored or pending DCT’s. I ordered a VXDIAG VCX Nano scanner that should arrive today from Amazon. Hoping that will show me some Toyota specific fault codes.
For me, if replacing modules has gone passed 5, then there might still be reasons you'd have t be revisiting the pack every now and then. Did you connect the small connector that is close to the safety plug? I think the connector I'm talking about is white sort of.
car is not ready on so most of the lights on is normal. there has to be a code, even if the orange battery plug isnt installed properly there would be a code.
Also, remember that anytime the 12v is disconnected, you will need to put foot on brake and press the power button twice to clear all the dash alarms.
Ok, very embarrassing. After posting here, then buying the VCX Nano scanner for $89, then paying $5 to text with a mechanic from Just Answer found I had forgotten the last step of sliding the orange safety clip down! Car was showing code P0A0D with the VCX Nano scanner, but showed no codes with my other scanning tools. Pushed down the safety clip and the vehicle is now running perfectly! The transmission did stumble once when backing out of the drive, but I think that was because I had driven it so long with the bad cells & lower voltage that it was impacting how the transmission worked. Apologize to all who posted on this tread for the false alarm. I did learn something though that I’ll share for anyone interested. The VCX Nano is great but was extremely difficult to get set up. It comes with no instructions, just a mini disk with a file that has a .rar extension. I learned that is a type of zipped file. Once I got the files unzipped there were 3 executable programs. The first is the Techstream scanner program. Install that first. The second was a VX manager software that can be used to update the firmware on the Nano. The third file was called Toyota Launcher that was very hard to download because my virus software thought it was infected. Its not, but you have to disable all your virus protectors to get it to download. Once downloaded and installed you run the Toyota Launcher and it lets you use the Techstream software without a Toyota dealer logon. Hope this info helps others get the Nano up and running.
If you could like your own post. Maybe that’ll be an enhanced feature. Hopefully better than the ads that were present a couple of weeks back.
don't feel bad, you'd be amazed at how many people think they reconnected it properly. it is not intuitive, and you can never remember from releasing it.
My bad...….I actually thought the diagram in post 4 would help....lol. Don't feel bad tracker, you are not the first and won't be the last. Took me 2 days to figure out on my first prius.
Think most of us have been there, did the same after replacing the timing chain in our high mileage Prius cause I'd pulled the safety plug as a "Just in case" thing. This forum saved my bacon on that occasion, very helpful people on here that don't pass judgement when you stuff up the simple bits. T1 Terry
