Brake, ABS, and traction lights

I've often posted individual diagrams or paragraphs from the manuals when they would be directly on point to an issue someone is having, but so far I've been drawing the line at copying entire sections.

There are some other members here who are more comfortable doing that, and I won't be surprised if that section gets posted here before long (or if you find another thread where it already has been).

Of course you can always follow the "more info" link I included above and obtain it yourself any time, in any of the ways Elektroingenieur kindly described there, some of which may be available to you at no cost.

 

this thread is AWESOME !

my 2011 had been flawless for the one week that I've owned it (surprised??) so far. yesterday I plugged in a cheap Amazon OBD2 bt reader to see if I could turn off the annoying backup beeper. that process was successful, and I left the code reader plugged in our of laziness.

I sat for an hour and read with the ignition on (full ignition) and occasionally checked the coolant temp, engine stuff via that bt reader.

I turned off the car to get the drone out, and when I turned it on again I had the abs ! brake etc lights on as mentioned in this thread.

I was very surprised, as I had about 800 miles of driving so far since I purchased it with 170k miles, with no issues before.

I stopped for fuel, used the RR, and checked the brake fluid level, without looking closely assumed it was low, and purchased some dot3. when I looked closer, it was full. time elapsed was about fifteen minutes OFF position.

turned the car on, no lights, and drove home normally.

what I noticed when the lights were on:
braking was poorer/odder than normal.
regen did not work at all.

I'm hopeful this is a very common error, attributed to the OBD2 reader, and not a sign of an expensive braking module that is about to fail ?

ten miles since removing the reader, two starts, no errors, regen works properly again

what do y'all think ?

 

Hey everyone,
My wife's 2011 Prius Gen3 just had this happen to it, brake, ABS and traction control lights all lite up.
I disconnected the Neg term on the battery (BTW DONT CLOSE THE HATCH) and tried to reset the warning lights. Didn't help.
I did have a ODB2 reader (BAFX Brand) connected for Dr. Prius but it didn't have any change after i unplugged it.
drove the car and noticed that the HV wasn't charging when applying the brakes. The brakes didn't have the normal aggressive stopping that i noticed when i bought the car a month ago.
The inverter/converter fluid was just below the low mark and has been from the time i got the car a month ago. I just got the Toyota super long life PINK coolant a day ago to do both the Rad and Inverter this weekend.
My wife kept saying to me " if the fluid, they (the internet) said it the fluid." I'm like, pfftttt, what the heck does the inverter coolant level have to do with the brakes????
You know where this is going right?
I topped off the low fluids in the inverter and radiator, warning lights went off and all is good in the world. I didn't want to bring it to the dealership, dont have the cash for that type of bill or do i trust them that much NOT to over charge.

Hope this help anyone that followed the thread this far, and I this was posted before, I'm sorry.

Seawing

 

OK........The above statement from me did do as i stated BUT the lights come back on the next day!!!!!!!

All I could do was think it had to do with the inverter so I took it to my friends house and he used his Toyota software and found I had a C1391 code. " if a brake fluid, internal or other leak is detected due to improper sealing in the actuator. Internal leakage is suspected if the pump motor operates frequently without breaking."
Again, Im new and thought the noise I heard was the inverter pumping coolant, NOPE, its the pump to the right and under the brake fluid reservoir. I belive there is a TSB for the 2010 to have theirs replaced but its one of those 10 year or 150k miles. I have a 2011 so I dont know if this is something I can have fixed by them or 7-14 hr of me doing it myself.

If this is cross posting or been addressed else where please DM and it can be removed. I just wanted to do a follow up to let ppl know its not just topping your fluids

 

If you're under or close on the years or the miles, it can't hurt to ask.

 

Little followup here, because back when I posted that I made the right guess for the wrong reasons.

ABS 42 doesn't mean anything besides "look at the ECB codes". VSC 45 also doesn't mean anything besides "look at the ECB codes." There's more about those odd "meta" codes (that can't be found in some Gen 2 repair manual editions) over here.

The ECB 66 code is the one that corresponds to C1345 "linear solenoid valve offset learning undone". If I had said that, I would have had the right guess for the right reason.

The ECB 95 (C1203) is an odd one; its fortune cookie is "ECM communication circuit malfunction", but its page in the repair manual has a "notice" to make sure the solenoid offset learning has been done before worrying about it. Come to think of it, I have seen a fair number of posts where it shows up alongside 66.

 

You mention that nothing special will happen if you do the jumper trick, assuming it's a solenoid re-learning procedure.
I have these lights on, and tried the pin things, and the yellow ABS lights performed as you described—with the one blink per second to four per second (as well as most of the other lights going haywire), but when I turned the vehicle off and back on, the three lights (ABS, Brake, and Traction) persisted.

I scanned the OBD at an Autozone and it threw the error C1391: Abnormal Leak of ACC PRESS

Any ideas that don't cost literally half my bank account?

Thanks~

 

I generally try to avoid speaking of jumper "tricks" ... there are some jumper "procedures", you know, things that are step-by-step written up right in the repair manual, if you need to do this thing, follow these steps and the thing will happen.

There is a procedure just like that in the manual, specifically to trigger the linear solenoid relearn. (There are in fact two different procedures that are triggered by jumpering the same pins; which one is selected is controlled by whether the parking brake is on or not.)

Too much talk of jumper "tricks" leads to too many posts on PriusChat (I'm not saying yours, just that there's history) where people kind of ignore that these procedures are for specific purposes, and just sort of blindly try everything they found in Google.

It probably did want to relearn the solenoid offset then. If it doesn't want to, it generally just does a steady fast blink when you do that. Did you know what codes you had at that time?

Yes; if your mileage is under 150,000, call your local Toyota dealer and say "ZJB" to them (you might want to also say "hello", and some of the back story), and you will get an ACC that doesn't leak PRESS, and it will cost you $0.

The bad news is, if you have $0 in your bank account, that will be literally half of it.

If you are over 150,000 but not by much, you could try calling them and saying "ZJB pleeeeeease" and see what they say.

If that doesn't work out, you probably need either an accumulator or an actuator (this or this depending on the mark on the one you've got).

Either the accumulator or the actuator can be at fault for a Leak of ACC PRESS, and sometimes it's possible to tell which it is (with a stethoscope, etc.) before plunking down money for one or the other. On either one, you might find a dealer discount down to $580 or $600 or so. Regrettably, if your bank account happens to be exactly $1160 to $1200, that could still end up being literally half.

 

I figured an OBD scan would take care of any need for getting blinking codes, but I can try that and report back. Right now I've left my 12V unplugged for a couple of hours and I'll see if that does anything.

I can't say I know what ZJB is.. My car is at about 76k miles right now, though, and if you're talking about getting an extended warranty deal, I would be glad to but already tried that route. Unfortunately my title is rebuilt, and extended warranties apparently don't apply to those

 

Right, ZJB was the identifier of a warranty extension campaign. Ordinarily you would qualify at 76k, but I guess the rebuilt title might nix that.

 

I had these same 3 lights come on in my car intermittently, causing loss of regen braking. The first few times I turned off the car then back on and it went way for a while. Then it came on all the time.

I think I solved mine without spending any money. What I did was after reading this thread I checked all my wheel speed sensors. For the fronts, I unscrewed the sensors from the hub, cleaned it with a rag and put them back in. They weren't dirty, just a bit dusty. For the rears, I didn't have the right pliers to take the electrical connector off from the hubs' speed sensors so I just wiggled the connection a bunch of times because I could sense some play in there, and pushed them back in as far as I could. I think the problem was dirt, freezing water and grime got inside the connector in this freezing weather messed up the proper electrical contact inside of there.

This seems to have made the lights go away. I've driven it for about 5 hours without the lights after this. If these lights happen to you, you should try this first. Just try to clean your speed sensors and wiggle them back in tight to ensure a proper connection.

 

It is easy to get the trouble codes when these three lights come on, which is how you find out why the brake ECU has put those three lights on. It's approximately useless to base anything on just "had the same 3 lights" because those are the only 3 lights the brake ECU has to alert you to problems with, and it uses them for pretty much all one or two hundred reportable issues.

If you don't have a scan tool, you can still get the trouble codes using nothing more than a short piece of wire, and counting the blinks of the lights. There are a lot of posts here on PriusChat on how to do that.

If you retrieve the trouble codes and the ones you get are about wheel speed sensors, then that would give you a good reason to at those sensors, as robomoto has done here.

If you retrieve the codes and the ones you get are about something else, then you would probably skip fiddling with the wheel sensors so you could spend your time checking out whatever issue is really being reported.

 

FWIW, I just had this exact occurrence on a road trip. An intermittently contacting OBD reader triggered an alarming dashboard light show -- solid yellow ABS, VSC, BRAKE (EXCLAMATION) indicators, along with a yellow HYBRID SYSTEM (EXCLAMATION) indicator, due to a blanket-blocked battery fan.

Be very careful with intermittent OBD contacts (and blankets). As someone said of the v, "it's a rolling network."