Master Warning, ABS, (!), and Hybrid Vehicle Warning icon

Patrick,

I'm sure you will find the the root cause of this problem. If you are on the original 12v battery though, it can play all kinds of weird tricks on your car. Hopefully it is not the battery ecu.

 

I just got my car back after being at the dealer for 1 week.

I was quoted $600 and ended up paying $700 for the inverter coolant pump. $472 was just the labor.

I noticed that it chirps the tires again now when I take off fast.

131,000 miles on my 2005

Waiting to trade in on a 2010.

 

One might estimate that steep/large elevation changes in more extreme temps that exercise the battery more rapidly and across more of its range would lead to the most rapid failure within the operating tolerance. However, being on flat ground with high temps, high humidity, and godawful traffic could also be hard on it (high AC amp draw when idling in traffic, along with crawling along, many starts/stops leading to deep cycles.) Can you say Houston?

It would be interesting to see the battery life expressed in terms of standard cycles and what impact various conditions have in reducing the cycle count. I'm not sure I've ever had a red/purple bar--if I did it was early on, perhaps after a long EV run followed by overnight cold soak when it dropped several bars overnight. I get double greens sometimes when coming downhill off the interstate and when the ICE is running incessantly in winter apparently to heat the battery. Here the terrain is hilly, so there are a lot of cycles and regen, but not deep cycles.

Patsparks is on a mission to prove that running out of gas once is a catastrophe, but I would be more concerned about 10 cycles up and down a mountain than a single out of gas episode. Running out of gas should not be a problem unless the driver then did several unwise things to compound the problem.

The good news for you is that you have this episode documented now. If something failed just outside of warranty you might get some help since you can point to it being a pre-existing condition. I did that with Nissan once, and they surprised me with 100% reimbursement (I would have gladly taken half.)

 

Re: HV battery heating. In my 2001 Prius, no operations would heat the battery as effectively as 'ridgerunning'; continual elevation changes on mountain roads. Flat country was not even close, regardless of outside temperatures and engine duty cycle.

The electrode design since 2004 is much better and those battery may heat less on the hills. This remains uncertain due to lack of experimental data.

 

Stray Gamma rays? Did you drive past the [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_test_site"]*[/ame] on the way to Arizona? :madgrin:

 

Perhaps the flash 3 years ago didn't actually take (was not done properly, or not at all since it was never entered into the system?) Is there a way to confirm what rev it has? Another remote possibility is that it was accidentally flashed with the wrong rev...or reflashed without your knowledge to the wrong rev. on a subsequent dealer visit for something else entirely.

 

Patrick,

I'm very glad to hear you've pulled through this one.

You should know, because of our time together at PCD, that I am the last one who really would know how to answer this question. (It won't stop me from trying, though.)

Is it possible that it was an issue with power supply to one of those ECUs? A little surge or some "dirty" power?

(And the rest of you: Take it easy on me, I'm just trying to learn a little here!)

 

Well, slap me silly. Three months ago during a superficially similar problem (but I did not get the trouble codes from the dealer) they told me they had to reflash the memory, that is, re-apply SSC 50P. At the time I thought that diagnosis was bulldada.

Then, apparently the same problem recurred one month later, and that instance was solved by replacing the inverter coolant pump. Since then all is well.

 

Well, let's hope this is issue never pops up again

 

I was getting the occasional all warnings before I changed my 12V battery. The errors wouldn't pop up until I drove the car for a bit. Sometimes they would disappear after a restart, but sometimes they'd stay on. Anyways, new 12V battery, and no icons in almost a year.

 

Good to see info from people having similar problems (and symptoms)...

I am having the same problem. But in additon to the symptoms above, the A/C compressor stopped working and when the ABS light came on, the car shifted into neutral and pressing the power switch would not turn the car off. The local dealer was stumped. THey initially blamed it on the 12v. battery. After they replaced it, I got about 4 miles down the road and presto! It happened again, except the ABS light didn't come on. (I turned the A/C off immediately to save power.)

Now the dealer is REALLY stumped. They expect to have the car several days to determine the REAL problem.

This thread appears to point at the inverter cooling pump as a probable cause. This could be a logical choice as we are having record high temperatures here this week. (I'm near Houston.) -- 101 yesterday, and expected to go over that today...

Meanwhile I'm not certain that I needed the 12v. battery, but they seemed to insist that I keep the new one...

 

So it seems pretty important to be able to monitor not only the
12V but also some basic inverter temps. I backprobed into the
two temp outputs for the MG1 and MG2 inverters the other day and
just watched them on a voltmeter for a while. GIVT and MIVT are
nice solid buffered outputs, not typical NTC thermistor circuits,
and most likely based from those thermal-sense leads on the IGBT
dies. They're just sort of wired to behave similarly to the typical
thermistor-plus-pullup like for engine coolant temp, cold at 4.25V
and going down to indicate heating.
.
They respond quite rapidly, especially for MG1 when it's either
under load or not, and show just how fast the coolant loop can
carry heat away from those suckers. It's also interesting how
when the car sits still for a while, the temp will slowly climb
to represent the general underhood temperature but as soon as
you start moving and getting some radiator airflow, it's right
back down. Nominal "nice and cool" seems to be around 3.8 - 4
volts; I would say anywhere down near 3, given Toyota's rough
diagram, is where one would start really worrying. I couldn't
push MG1's signal any lower than 3.5 while sitting still and
force-charging at 40 amps.
.
Given the solidity of the signal output impedance [2K to ground
didn't even touch it] I can probably just voltage-divide it by
about 3 and send it to the same linearizer circuit on my panel to
at least get a representative view of either temp, and thus have
a fairly immediate indication of what's going on in there.
.
_H*

 

Are the wires exposed or do I need to open some panels? Thanks!

 

Hobbit,

Is there an inverter coolant temp that can be read by Scangauge?

 

Finally it occurs to me: if the flash ROM which is the subject of SSC 50P is located inside the inverter housing, then a coolant failure could cause it to overheat and spontaneously corrupt. Correcting that would require re-flashing (in practice, another application of SSC 50P) after the coolant pump has been replaced. D'ohh!!

 

Don't know if that is the location or not, but I like the thought process. If this is correct then Toyota would have a bigger issue with the coolant pump failures than originally believed, because the resulting overheat could overwrite/erase some flash upgrades.

Even if the location of the flash ROM is in some place not physically impacted by the overheat, I wonder if the inverter lockout (or whatever it is that happens) results in it resetting to some hardcoded defaults that negate/ignore/overwrite the flash.

With a PC on some motherboards when you set a particularly bad BIOS setting you have to clear the BIOS with a jumper, else it stays locked hard and fast despite setting some dipswitches and such back to defaults trying to clear it. (I've seen that behavior mostly in playing with memory timings and frequency.) Now in the PC case this is a user loaded setting that is getting written, not quite the same as the underlying BIOS flash, but I wonder if there are parallels? Is the ECU flash more like BIOS setting adjustment, or more like the hardware flash routine...or a hybrid?