I had the recall done last Spring on a 2012 Prius 3(91786 miles). Service guy said there were two possibilities. One, was the software upgrade and two, a part replacement if they could not do a software fix. They ended up with the software fix. Yesterday the dashboard lit up. The two orange lights on the left plus some more on the right. The display said there was an issue with the hybrid system. Put a Blue Driver scanner on it and pulled 8 codes: Permanent Trouble Codes 1. P0A7A Generator/Inverter performance 2. P0A94 DC/DC converter performance Antilock Brake System Codes 3. C1259 HV Control system regenerative malfunction 4. C1310 "Check report for description" Nothing else. 3 Radar or Hybrid Control Codes P0A7A P0A94 P324E MG-ECU Power Relay Intermittent Circuit 1RL-Door Motor Code B2312 "Check report for Description" Nothing else 1 Tire Pressure Warning System Code C2123 Transmitter ID 3 not received(Main) No issue previously with brakes or tire pressure. Could these inverter codes be related to the recall and the part actually needs to be replaced? Could these other codes be a result of the inverter codes? Thanks Ron
Check the date of the codes if they were stored prior to the software fix. Hoping it was the tpms ID 3 that set off the CELs and all other codes are before the software fix.
We have lift off. Repairs were covered by the extended IPM warranty and the car was back home in under 4 hours. I'll check the codes tomorrow and see if they left them there. I'll clear them if they didn't and keep an eye on it through the scanner.
The problem was the IPM(Intelligent power module) The item that the recall was about. The software patch that was supposed to lower the temperature inside the unit. You can lower the temps, but the module has been subjected to the elevated temperature for 7 1/2 years. I'm thinking the module was just about fried when they added the new software. Service guy said sometimes the unit wouldn't be able to be given the software solution and then they replace the unit. What should have happened is that every IPM should be replaced so the unit can then get the new software and you start fresh. I'm happy that Toyota didn't play games and try to pass this issue off to me as an unrelated IPM or hybrid problem. According to the Service guy, this was a $2000.00 job. Seems like a high number, but I have no idea what the parts cost or the labor to get to it. I've been buying Toyotas since 1988. This was the first time in 32 years any(4) of them has needed anything besides tires, brakes and normal maintenance. Now GM, that's another depressing bit of kit.
Repair was no charge due to Toyota extending the warranty on this item. There was another poster on this sight that had the same issue. Took it to the Valley stream Toyota dealer and the repair was covered as well. He posted the bill and the part listing was the same. Seems this part was engineered incorrectly and they're failing often.
Car is on Long Island, NY. Used by my wife to go to work for 4years, retired for 3 1/2. Doing about 11-12K a year.
Software patch had nothing to do with reducing heat. That was incorrect. The software patch allowed you to "limp home" as opposed to the car dying on the side of the road. It did nothing to compensate for the defective part.
Thankfully! The IPM in my 2010 with only 75500 miles on it died yesterday, 01/23/20. The thing died in Charlotte, four miles from the nearest dealer. I live in High Point (60+ miles away). They are fixing it now... — Bill Burkholder
There have been two software patches for the inverter. Looking through my receipt book, documents sent to me by Toyota Canada: March 2014 SOSH-230-1A My undertanding of this one: there was concerns that hard/sudden accelerations demands could cause some welds in the circuitry to fail. The software update is to make the surge come on a little more gradually. January 2019 SOSH-R66-1A This time, the concern was that in event of invert failure you would be left stranded, sometimes. Software update to fix this.
We had the same two recalls in the US, only with different names: E0E for the earlier one, J0V for the later. E0E changed the programming that switches the transistors in the IPMs, and a close reading of the defect information report for that one differs somewhat from the usual PriusChat story about it. There was a problem involving solder not staying nicely annealed if it got heated and then cooled too quickly, and there are a lot of armchair engineers on PriusChat who have decided the programming change must have been a power limit to reduce the heating. Which of course is so not the first thing I would try for solving a too-fast-cooling problem. But, you know, we're PriusChatters, and Toyota only has engineers, so they have to make do somehow. The J0V recall was a bit of an interesting story. Mostly, it's about correcting one corner case in the programming where the failure of an IPM transistor would leave you in power-off instead of limp-home. (And a really obscure corner case too: if the transistor happened to fail at just the right instant, under just the right current, that the sudden change in current flow produced an interference spike picked up on a completely different part of the circuit and triggering the shutdown programming! Try predicting that one before it happens....) But there was another part of the J0V story. It seemed that some fraction of cars that had the E0E recall done still ended up having crunchy-solder problems anyway. And the reason turned out kind of embarrassing; a low-five-figures number of cars that had the E0E recall "done" in fact had not had all of the programming reflashed. Why? Um ... an editorial goof in the instructions that were handed out to the dealer techs doing the work. Several different places in the instructions had all the correct steps, but there was one section where one step was missing, so if a tech got to the point of having done several cars and feeling pretty familiar, and paying a little less attention to the instructions as a whole but just kind of skimming along, they could end up leaving out that step. So the J0V recall did also involve making sure that all the reflashing that was supposed to happen in E0E really got done (they developed a whole new module for Techstream that checks for the needed updates itself, and reports back to the mother ship that they've really been done. Somebody really didn't want to hear any more stories about updates getting missed!).
I got a free fix and free rental car. I drove home to High Point and came back the next day. Hendrick Toyota of Concord was very apologetic on behalf of Toyota... especially since my car had had all the recalls done previously and it still blew a power transistor in the inverter. All is fine, now, we hope. — Bill Burkholder
