Feds Investigate Hot-Selling Toyota Hybrid

The car won't actually shift into drive (or reverse) until it is ready to do so. And it's not ready to do so until the computer is up and running.

I kinda doubt that's the case.

 

my car wont shift into gear until that single beep which signifys a successful bootup.

 

I believe his point was that there is a point at which the computers are booted and will let you place the car in gear; however there are still certain background startup procedures or synchronizations running.

This could very well be total nonsense; I am just regurgitating what I’ve heard from the service manager at my dealership.

 

When mine conked on me last Nov, it was during a heat wave: around +8 C. I had been driving in city traffic for about 20 mins when I stopped for a red light.

It was warm enough for the ICE to shut down.

When the light turned green, the traffic ahead started moving very slowly. The car went about half a block on battery at under 30 km/h, then traffic picked up and I accelerated.

The ICE lurched, the TOD lit up, and that was that. I managed to go another block on battery to a truck stop, which is next to a large towing company, where I pulled in and shut down.

The reflash cured it, at least so far.

Some folks have commented on the "hang" when trying to power up. Maybe that's what your service writer was talking about. Hasn't happened to me yet.

 

JonnyCat: Like I said, it's only my guess.

Why do I think it's operator error instead of the car? Well, it may just be the car w/ the software not recognizing the many driving styles of drivers. But the reason that led me to think it's mostly the drivers' fault is due of my background. As a pilot, I know that planes flying today are fundamentally well built and engineered. However pilots have average skills and they crash planes on a daily basis (see ntsb.gov. search aviation). Therefore I am conditioned to feel that drivers are at fault rather than the cars. Otherwise we would be seeing most Cessna 172s, most Boeing 737s, and many more Prius conking out!

 

well the recall on the news has everyone excited at work today. i must have had at least a dozen people ask me if i heard about the recall on my car.

most probably mentioned it as payback for my incessant chattering about my car. i can t help but feel that many are secretly praying for my fall...especially the "$60 a week in gas" bunch

 

Recall?

 

"potential recall" i am assuming?

the nhtsa has not issued a recall. funny how the new eclipse hasn't been out for more than a few weeks and it's been recalled. or the saturn brake light recalls? hmmmmmmmm

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Jonnycat26\";p=\"95328)</div>

I was trying to put some perspective on both the difference in magnitude of the problems, and the difference in how management delt with the problems.

 

that is what the national news said. i didnt see it but i heard it from at least 6 people already. afaik, the only thing that is happening is the NTSA is launching an investigation.

 

go figure, leave it to the news to use the word "recall" prematurely. this is what i say when i say the media causes unnecessary fear in this country... and is also the reason i don't watch the news anymore.

according to the nhtsa there is no recall as of yet. it will take a bit of time for the investigation to take place.

 

I think Don Henley got it right " bubble headed bleach blond come's on at 5 "

 

i just called Toyota and they say that there has been an investigation started and they are cooperating fully. they verified my address and said that any cars that needs an update will be contacted by mail. currently they say that there were 33 reports of problems and that everything the NTSB has done so far is routine

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Frank Hudon\";p=\"96233)</div>

Frank:

Geez if you remember Don Henley like I do, then we ARE getting old.

Jay

 

There seem to be so many threads active about this, I'm not sure where to put this, but this thread has been active recently, so we'll try here. I had mentioned in one of these threads that we saw this problem near the end of May, and I've since had the car serviced, TSB applied, etc.

To recap, I saw this (or a similar) failure on 5/27/2005, and reported it to the NHTSA, (ODI #10122371), and, since it was a busy weekend and none of the Toyota dealers locally had space in their schedules, I took it into Auburn Toyota on 1 June.

Back when I first bought the car (last August), we had a small similar hiccup (which we attributed to some startup problems people were having - as I recall the folk-wisdom at the time was that this was caused by something burning off being misinterpreted by one of the sensors. Roseville Toyota (where we bought the car) looked at the error codes, said they needed to apply a reflash, then decided it had already been applied at the factory, so we didn't do anything at the time.) Anyway, no problems for over 10000 miles, then the event on 27 May 2005. I guess in the meantime they've come out with a more comprehensive TSB, since this time they felt they needed to apply one. (details follow).

Anyway, as regards this most recent problem, it happened on the hill coming up to my house (which is quite steep). Speed probably 15 to 20 mph. The car had been driven about 9 miles (mostly uphill, some mixed, mostly freeway, last 3 miles not freeway). We just barely made it up to the top of our hill and coasted down the driveway. Several reboots of the car made most of the indicators go off, the ICE kicked on again, and the next morning all was normal (including ALL indicators being off).

The 800 number for Toyota was closed for the weekend. If you pressed the number in the phone tree regarding the 'stall problem', they made some comments (what sounded somewhat disparaging to ma anyway) regarding people reporting problems with stalling (some form of the word 'allege' was in the comment, but I didn't write it down).

I called two dealers and talked to service reps,as to what I should do immediately. They both thought it would be OK to drive locally until after the weekend, but not to take any long trips until they could read the codes, and determine a plan to address it.

I went into Auburn (20 miles closer than Roseville, and they had an appt. a day sooner) to get it looked at. When I took it into Auburn, I described the problem, and gave them a printout of my NHTSA report. They did apply a TSB this time. The service order reads (as to CAUSE, anyway)


CAUSE: CODE P3191 ECU OUT OF CALIBRATION
EG4017 MIL "ON" DTC P3191 P3190 AND TSB
331 W93
FC: T1-8AT2-99
PART#: 89441407070
COUNT: 1
CLAIME TYPE: RG
AUTH CODE:

RECALIBRATE ECU PER TSB EG047-04

(then there's a bunch of asterisks and some stuff about the 40J navigation recall - looks like they ordered me a part, but nobody mentioned anything to me about it). If they put a calibration sticker in the car (as EG047-04 says they should), I couldn't find it.


---------------
As to whether it's fixed or not - I've seen this problem twice in 10000 miles (maybe two different ones - I took better notes the second time). It's very hard to tell if anything was really fixed here, or if they are just blowing smoke and/or being hopeful.

I've done enough system testing to know that if you see one or two cases of a failure in weeks of testing, that it will MOST LIKELY recurr unless you can actually "root cause" and FIX the problem.

There IS a REAL problem here somewhere that results in the ICE shutting down. I can say that with ABSOLUTE certainty.

Reading the postings here and on the NHTSA board shows a pretty consistent story (yeah, there's some stuff out on the NHTSA that's pretty emotional, but there's probably some legal requirement that they have to provide the RAW data, and that's about as raw as it gets). Is the problem dangerous? Possibly in some circumstances. Is it worse than problems with other cars stalling? maybe not (probably not, and having the electric available when the ICE kicked out is really a feature, not a bug - it certainly helped in our case). Has Toyota fixed the problem? Well, they haven't given (at least to me) any solid information as to the actual cause and what they fixed, so that's hard to say. Should they recall? Well, if they have a REAL root cause and a real fix, probably yes.

One thing to remember is that there may be a number of conditions (i.e. gas cap off, something painted outgassing fooling a sensor, ...other conditions) that may ALL EXPOSE something like a datacomm problem on one of the lans (that causes a bunch of systems to become confused as to the states of adjacent modules). Thus, a problem in a datacom protocol may turn a minor issue (which maybe should've 'logged' a warning) into looking like something much more major. (In our case, we had the red exclaimation point, the amber engine, the amber brake system warning light, the vsc, the hybrid system warning light ALL on (plus a message on the MFD).). To me this suggests that the whole system was pretty confused as to its state.

I think someone stated that this TSB causes the ICE to stay on more than preveiously, although I couldn't find anything in the TSB itself that says that.

As regards this type of problem, If they're just 'reflashing with the latest firmware', and hoping the problem goes away, that's probably the best they can do for now. If there have been changes, say, that Toyota believes improves the robustness of communications on one of the lans... and that may have "fixed" whatever was causing the problem, so that may be a rational thing to do. It's impossible to have every car instrumented to provide a complete record of all bus transactions, including timing... they're pretty much limited to what gets recorded. IF it were a problem with a server product in my lab at work, we would try to come up with ways to reproduce the problem more quickly (reduce time-to-failure), and to have some systems instrumented such that we could get better data on what led up to the failure.

If someone who is fairly technically competent on these cars wants to try to design a survey to gather some stats and put it on this board, it might provide some good data independent of the terse announcements that have come out of Toyota. (i.e. collect VIN, TSBs applied, date of failure (temperature related?), etc.)

I still like my car both technically and practically. It's been fun to drive and I don't hesitate to recommend it. But... this problem needs to be driven to root cause if it hasn't already. If not, it'll continue to be a thorn in the side.

 

(Edited to clarify sub subject: as regards to the possibility of the car moving before 'fully booted')...

When it happened to me on 27 May, we had driven about 10 miles before this happened.

If the Prius is capable of "going into gear" and moving prior to 'all the computers fully starting up', that's a serious problem itself. The transmission is computer-controlled, and the vehicle should not be allowed to move if the vehicle isn't fully ready. I suppose this might be the syndrome here, and that some sort of corruption could happen that shows up later.

But if doing this can cause a 'sleeper' problem that gets exposed (killing the engine!), say, 10 minutes later, that's also a serious problem, and should be addressed.

I think this was unlikely to be the cause in my case (but stranger things have been known to happen).

 

Again, the car won't GO until it's ready to do so.... there is no "computer warm up time" and the car will not LET you do anything until the computers are all running.

I think whatever service manager said that had no technical experience in Prius work and was spewing garbage to get a customer out of his way. That's my thoughts anyway.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Frank Hudon\";p=\"96233)</div>

speaking of which, did anyone catch the Eagles Farewell Concert on TV the other night?

excellent show and will be picking up the DVD on the 23rd ( i think...sometime this month for sure)

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(bparrish\";p=\"96310)</div>

Since nobody here has seen the source code, who knows?

I do have experience with CANBus on the industrial process control side. Since it's Timing Triggered, in theory - assuming the RTOS isn't weird or stuck in a Hot Restart loop - once the fault clears a few reboots should bring things back to life.

As far as the "datacomms" on the car, both CANBus and LIN (Whatever Toyota calls it) are tightly structured so one device normally cannot overwrite and corrupt the entire stack. Also this will minimize, but not eliminate, comms errors or failures.

This is similar in concept to the Backup LAS (Link Active Scheduler) used in industrial process control. The Backup LAS will keep the entire segment up if a partial or total datalink failure/error happens between the host and the segment. Assuming the Backup LAS is downstream of the error.

There have been a few recent news articles commenting on the "unexpected" increase in software-related errors and complaints in cars. I would suggest the increase in software-related problems is entirely predictable and expected.

Many new cars/trucks have in excess of 10 MLOK and I rather doubt routine iteration testing will uncover all abends or latches. You can develop to CMM 5 but that is very expensive and time consuming.

It seems that rather than new cars having bum transmissions, they're being shipped with bum RTOS's and onboard networks.

BTW if you snoop around NHTSA and do a search for "stalling" you'll be surprised at how many cars/trucks have this problem. Companies like Ford, DC, and GM had better be careful how they exploit this, as inevitably somebody is going to ask about their vehicles stalling too.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(DaveinOlyWA\";p=\"96365)</div>

Dave:

Yep we're both showing our age ...

Jay