Hello there, newbie here. My Prius recently decided to not start after a long trip. I checked the auxiliary battery and it has good power. The dome lights and headlights work. But when you put the fob in the slot and press the power button, nothing happens. no juice. I had it towed to the dealer and quoted me "traced down to ign. relay box need to replace and recheck may have other problems" $953.32 Parts $246.98 Labor $706.34 I didn't have a chance to talk to anyone yet. I found an ignition relay at Autozone for $56 but I'm not sure where to locate the Ignition Relay inside the car. I was thinking I could try that before accepting to pay almost $1000. Does anyone have any thoughts or advice for me in this situation? I've been trying to research this online and haven't found anything helpful yet. Thank you so much.
I don't buy it You need to be able to read the code yourself and if you went to a dealer they should have handed you a printout with the codes that they got that got them to this ignition relay which I'm not really buying too much there's a few relays under your hood you can see them under the hood under the cover of the fuse box they're gray and black and blue and what have you If you flip the lid over and hold it correctly it will tell you what each one of those relays is they're probably is an ignition relay they rarely go bad there's a couple relays under there that you can swap out with other ones the bottoms will be the same and the diagrams on the top will be the same in the part numbers will be similar but I don't think you even need to do any of this. How is your 12 volt battery with the car not on and no buttons pushed and no one's sitting in the car what do you have on your 12 volt tabs under the hood in the fuse box under the red cover or back at the battery across the positive and negative terminals Do you have in fact 12 plus volts not lower than the 12 volts not 11.5 not 10.7 but 12 plus? If not that's where you want to start having 12 volts in the battery in the back of the car that can be shorted for 10 seconds and then when you take the short away it recovers to 12 volts It's not doing that well that could be the beginning of your issues what happens if you hold the start button down does everything all of a sudden light up? What happens if you don't do anything with your foot on the brakes or anything and you push the power button once let go then push it again do all the lights come on the dash?
Sounds like the dealership is making stuff up... Never heard of a entirely failed relay box? But there are specific relays in that box that could fail. As Tom above said the Toyota Stealership needs to give more details about their diagnosis / error codes. If I were in your situation, I'd head to a pick N' Pull and pull the relays from the relay box of a wrecked Prius and try them out. Or better yet, find someone with same type of Prius and ask them if you can swap out some relays to diagnose which one is bad.
