My car won’t start Dash lights all came on

smh

Band-aids on band-aids.....

I really hope you don't come back asking for us to fix the next problems you cause yourself, and I'm pretty sure you're gonna make your problems worse.

 

Where exactly on the dash are you going to slap the resistor?

 

That's what I've been wondering.

 

OK, as an electrical engineer, who has taken apart the dash of a couple Gen 2 Prii, I'm going to hazard a guess that you've heard mention of the very common issue of capacitors failing on the combo meter and you are confused about capacitors and resistors and coils and diodes and FETs and stuff like that.

@dolj and I are puzzled by this resistor you keep mentioning because no one has ever heard of a resistor causing this problem. We're concerned that you're going to mess up your car worse than it already is because you appear to be headed into a repair job not knowing what needs to be done. Besides the concern about the car itself, this job involves disconnecting and handling an air bag and that's potentially very dangerous.

 

Likely not.
The worst case scenario is that your "spare" battery is just as bad off or worse than the one IN the car now.
If you don't just get a new battery and charge it good before use........you might be screwing with this forever.
But then some people seem to enjoy butting their head against a brick wall.
Good luck.

 

I'm just a control systems engineer with a Mechanical education. Perhaps you can help me explain how putting in a resistor won't change the power dissipation? OP clearly doesn't get it.

As far as I see it, best case scenario is that the resistor "becomes the battery drain" rather than a dash light. More likely it seems that, despite amperage decreasing, total power dissipation should increase, making the problem worse.

 

there is something people replace on the meter, bad capacitor? i'd have to search...

 

That depends on if it's installed in series or parallel with the other loads.

 

Fair point. It sounds like OP is planning series, if I had to guess

 

Way, WAY too much guessing going on here.

 

Honestly.... if OP wasn't so thick, I wouldn't bother. But I can just see the next post:

"Why do I have to jump my car every day? No lights on anywhere"

 

Didn't he already say that ?
Or was that a different thead ??

 

He's said he has to jump it every day and doesn't understand why. Says he has a new battery too, plus a spare.

Sounds a lot like shoddy work being done by someone who is used to fixing a 1982 Ford truck with whatever spare parts are laying around the junkyard. Sadly, cars aren't that nice to us anymore.

 

Is there a transistor that flakes out in Gen 2 meters? I thought I'd heard about a cap.

 

still searching...