VSC ABS ! With No Codes

Yes, anyone can. You just focus on one light at a time, and count.

Your ((!)) light (which cognoscenti call the "ECB light", electronically controlled braking) is blinking "36".

Your ABS light is blinking "33".

Your VSC light is blinking "43".

Your tire pressure light is blinking "24".

Then you turn to the Repair Manual (more info), and you find that the tire pressure code "24" is equivalent to code C2124 that a scan tool would read, and means the tire pressure receiver isn't getting a signal from the transmitter that was registered in slot 4. (That doesn't tell you right away which tire that transmitter is in, unless you have kept track of that, but if you watch your tire pressures with a scan tool and you let a little air temporarily out of one tire at a time, you'll figure out which one isn't reading. It's an old car, battery in that transmitter could be shot.)

You find for the ABS "33" it's equivalent to C0210 on a scan tool, and means the brake computer is getting a wonky wheel speed signal from the right rear. That could be the wheel speed sensor itself, or something in the wiring back to that sensor, etc. All the computer can tell is the signal is weird, so a human needs to figure out why. There are five pages in the manual for that code with tests you can make to pin down where the fault is and how to fix it.

The "36" on the ECB light and the "43" on the VSC light were left out of the Gen 2 manual (early editions, anyway), but that got fixed for Gen 3, which explains that "36" on ECB and "43" on VSC both mean "never mind me, go look at your ABS code."

 

It's very often good news. It's almost always better news than having some pre-OBD car flake out and not have any codes to explain it.

We have a little bit of a catastrophizing problem on PriusChat, where despite the fact that there are several hundred trouble codes programmed in and most of them are for fairly minor things, as soon as you post that you've seen warning lights, usually you'll get several responses telling you it's probably one of the two or three most expensive issues anybody can think of.

So far (finding some wood to knock on), all of the codes that have ever come up on my car have been for things that were no sweat to fix. The key is just to keep calm, read them, look them up in the manual, deal with them.

That's the nice thing about the code blink method. As long as you can find a little wire, you can read those codes on your own, wherever you are.

A downside is that not all of the computers in the car play the blinkenlights game. Some can only have their codes read with a scan tool. And even for the ones that do give blink codes, a proper Prius-capable scan tool will be able to give you more detailed information than just the blink codes. But that probably won't be the scanner they have at Autozone anyway. (It's not uncommon here for people to scrounge an elderly Windows laptop and put Techstream on it.) Short of doing that, the blink code method does pretty well, for the brake/skid system anyway. It can be more reliable than using some random code scanner that might not successfully retrieve the codes; cuts out the middleman.

 

Do you still have the C2124 though? A little hard to reconcile that with none of the transmitters being bad. But could be a receiver antenna or wire harness issue. There are six pages in the Repair Manual of ways to check and pin down the cause.

 

The SET button's only function is to tell the TPMS to remember the current tire pressures as being the pressures you like to maintain.

Unless you change your mind about what pressures you like to maintain, there is never a reason to press it.

 

The important thing is to visit the Repair Manual (more info) to find the methodical steps you can use to work from those codes to what has actually caused them. The "fortune cookie" that Techstream shows next to the code is generally not enough information to do that.

 

Little Nevr-Dull would've cleaned that right up.