Red Triangle & Problem Light

you need oil

 

Well what I would do before I started driving 10 mi or 12 miles or any miles is check the oil on the dipstick It's under the hood pretty quick to do even in the cold another thing is to also make sure you have plenty of coolant when you had the triangle and the exclamation point in Amber on if this is what was happening what was the little green car on the multifunction display? Was it red?

 

What Tombukt2 is talking about whenever he goes on about the "green car" "turning red" is this:

On every one of the gen 2 MFD screens (except the map itself), there is a different icon in the top left corner that identifies the screen. On one of the dozen screens, the "Energy Monitor" screen, the icon happens to be a green car.



No matter what screen you happen to be on, if there is a problem to report, a problem display will cover up a top portion of the screen, and have a little red car icon at the left that ends up roughly where the icon of the original screen happened to be. Depending on the vintage of your MFD, it looks like one of these:




In both cases, you can clearly tell this is just covering what was on the screen beneath and drawn over it. In the top version, they even gave it "3D" shadows to really make that point. Even in the bottom version, you can tell it has blanked out a top strip of the screen that was showing under it.

So the real question is just, do you have the red-car problem icon showing on your MFD? It will show regardless of what MFD screen you have up. If you happen to have the Energy Monitor screen up, and you're not paying much attention, then yeah, it can look like a "green car" "turned red".

 

When was the last time you checked the oil level? It can be low right now. It only takes a few minutes.

If the low tire pressure warning functions properly, how can you "not have time" to check it? The tire(s) might be at 26 psi, or it might be at 12 psi. It could possibly fail at any point. The system is warning you that the car might be unsafe.

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Checking the coolant flow at the inverter is also important.
The inverter circuit pump failure is quite common on old Gen2. The pump should work constantly and pump coolant when the car is turned on until it is turned off.