Prius ICE won't turn on. Limp mode.

Wait! This way you'll figure it all out.
Have you checked the cause of the error as ChapmanF advised in post #28?
I agree with him that this error has a higher priority than others.

 

Are there no more engine errors?
The lights with red and yellow signs are not on?

 

For future reference, this 2011 Prius video has the basics on how to get a no start on the engine diagnosed.

Spoiler alert: This engine has a hg leak but the no start is unrelated except for the fact other shops had fired the parts cannon on the morning rattles and caused the no start.

In this case the no start was not a fuel pump failure or the hg. However at 12:35 he shows a no parts required fuel pressure check followed by an easy fuel pressure check with a gauge.

 

Has the miles been mentioned?

 

How did you determine this? Was the coolant spilled near the area of the transmission where the resolver wiring plugs in?



Is the P0A4B code gone now? If it was caused by coolant getting into that connection, let's hope it stays gone.

Yes, the general code P3190 can be caused by a fuel pump problem, as well as by many other things. The code means the engine is producing less than a fifth of the right amount of power (colloquially, it is running like cr@p). The person doing the engine diagnostics gets to figure out why. Fuel pump is one possibility.

P0456 is set when the car's vapor-capture integrity test detects air leaking at least as fast as through the test system's 0.02 inch reference orifice. The code is set the next time the test is repeated if it detects the same thing. This is certainly a fuel-related issue, but a different kind of one.



The reports you found linking the power-steering warning light to fuel issues go back to a very old thread of Bob Wilson's when he was doing run-the-car-out-of-fuel testing. He got the EPS light because he didn't stop driving when the engine quit but kept on driving until the traction battery was so depleted the car had to shut all the power electronics down to protect it. The steering ECU reported the drop in voltage.



If somebody else has their engine quit because of a fuel pump problem and also keeps right on driving until the car has to shut the power electronics down to save the traction battery, they might also see the EPS light, again reflecting that shutdown of electrical power. It's only in that, quite indirect, sense that the EPS light can ever have anything to do with an engine or fuel issue.

If the EPS light comes on to report such a (possibly temporary) drop in available power, it doesn't set any steering (C15xx or U0129/U0293/U1105) codes. When it comes on for any other reason it will set such a code. So, scanning for codes (with a scan tool known able to communicate with the EPS) is never a bad idea to understand why the light has come on.

 

I had 2 experiences with "limp mode" in my Gen 3. The first time, I was traveling home from a long trip, and I wanted to see how far I could go after the "empty" warning. I was amazed to have gotten 180 kms before the car went into limp mode. I poured in the gas can I had been carrying, and made it to the next gas station.

The second time happened from neglect. I had been running around town on business, on empty, thinking that I had plenty of range left, even after it went into limp mode. I was wrong, and found myself stranded, without enough power to even raise the windows. Luckily I was only a few hundred metres from a gas station.

 

"Limp mode" is often used differently by different people. It can mean:

• an actual reduced-power mode the car enters, as programmed, in response to certain trouble codes being set, to allow the driver a chance to get out of traffic
• a reduction in power the driver notices if the engine has quit, leaving only battery power available
• that powerless roll to a stop when even the battery power isn't there
• about anything else a PriusChat poster thinks "limp mode" sounds like a good description of

Because people use "limp mode" to mean so many different things, it's usually most helpful in a post to just describe clearly what the circumstances were and what the car did.

 

The repair manual states that if the EPS indicator lights up, you just need to check the voltage, which should be within the established limits from 11 to 14V.
The electric power steering is a fairly powerful consumer, the fuse is rated for 60A.
When the traction battery is turned off (for any reason, including lack of fuel) due to a voltage drop to the cutoff of the high-voltage battery, the DC-DC converter stops working and does not supply energy to the 12V low-voltage network.
A 12V battery cannot cope with all the devices that eat up its energy. "Bolivar cannot carry two." And here there are many more riders, the mass of the ECU, headlights, brake system pumps, EPS, etc.
The battery suddenly drops to less than 11V and the EPS ECU sounds the alarm, displaying a red icon on the panel.
Apparently, this is why there is an association that the reason for the failure to start is the power steering. In fact, the failure EPS occurs later and this could be determined by the time stamps of the freeze frames of errors recorded in different ECUs.

 

The gen 3 steering ECU only provides assist in READY mode: this surprised me a little, because my gen 1 would provide assist in IG-ON mode and even for a minute or so after turning the key OFF, catering to those who might like to give the wheel a final twist as they shut the car off. But sure enough, I tried the other night in my gen 3, and when only in IG ON mode, there was no assist.

It seems the gen 3 ECU may be designed to depend on the higher READY voltage of 13.5 to 14.8 supplied by the DC/DC converter. The datalogs in Bob's test showed battery voltage dropping back to 12.32 when the DC/DC converter shut down. Not down to 11 volts, not even so unusual a voltage to see from the 12 V battery in IG ON mode. But still apparently low enough to trigger the EPS warning when the car is supposedly READY and the expected voltage is higher.

The steering assist can draw a lot of current, but only when actually assisting a turn. When not turning, it is not the heavy current draw pulling the voltage down, but simply the EPS showing a warning that assist power will be limited if you try to turn.

I am not positive, from Bob's old thread, whether the traction battery in fact "turned off" (system main relays dropped out, READY light off), or whether the relays remained closed but the inverter and DC/DC converter were signaled to stop. I think it may have been the latter.

In any case, for a thread like this one, the main point is that the EPS light coming on like this doesn't "mean" anything as specific as an engine or fuel issue. It is reporting a drop in the 12-volt system voltage below what's expected while READY, which would be at the end of a longish chain of consequences, which may have started with such an engine problem, or with some other cause. Diagnosis ought to proceed accordingly.