2008 Prius Red Exclamation Mark, (!), VSC, and Check Engine light

Your an idiot the cells to the battery are $40/each on Amazon do the work and fix the battery if this is the problem or troubleshoot the issue. Get a mechanically inclined friend or be nice to someone and you can figure it out

 

check the fluids make sure they are full, check the coolant inverter pump is working, check the regular car battery is ok, check the fans on battery are clean, check transaxle fluid, you can use an obd 2 and torque pro app to check the battery cells or take it to the dealership to check which cell is bad but you can also do it yourself easily if you remove the hybrid battery.

 

A lot of stupid opinions on here guessing what is wrong. Here is the answer. Toyota had a recall on the combination meter which is actually the instrument cluster that controls the Hybrid drive being the motor and Transmission.
After around 200,000 miles most all of them go bad.
My 2008 Prius would sometimes idle high, or go into neutral without the ability to put it in drive unless I stopped, turned off the car and started it again, things got worse it would die and restart more often than normal at stop lights and sometimes go into neutral while driving losing power which made it not dependable to drive, it had the battery warning exclamation mark warning the issues can vary but the fix, although simple takes some skill.

What happens is one or more of the capacitors on the combination meter board go bad, which is the part that has the digital speedometer led display .

Using a capacitance meter to check the capacitors in circuit is not a ideal way to check them in circuit , sometimes you will still get a reading as if they are good because they are tied to other circuitry , I used both a capacitance meter and a ESR meter , the meter is good for testing in circuit. I used the MESR 100 which is used for checking the ohms of the capacitors in circuit. 2 capacitors had higher readings than listed for their uf rating and their voltage using a ESR chart as a reference.

The first board I repaired that was originally in the car and would not allow you to even start the car, I replaced 2 bad smd capacitors put the board back in the car and it fixed the problem

I had 2 boards, both had the same bad capacitors, the 10uf 35v and the 100uf 16v . If you don't have a meter you can try replacing them.

First thing before attempting the repair, unhook the negative cable from the battery and keep it unhooked until everything is reconnected, you have to unhook the airbag to remove the dash which houses the meter. You don't want to mess with the air bag with the battery hooked up so you don't create another problem