Car died on me today- any thoughts on my issues?

what is the oil level at?

 

what codes did you get?

 

do you have an obd 2 code reader that you can plug in?

 

troubleshooting will be very hard without one. can you pick one up with another car? they are like 15 dollars at walmart and can bluetooth to free apps on your phone. (Some won’t be compatible with the hybrid system as a heads up)

 

Sounds like you may have a 12v issue, if the last battery was purchased and installed at the dealer, then it should still be under warranty.

Out of curiosity, when was the inverter coolant pump last replaced? (they don't last forever)

 

nah if it won’t power on im pretty sure you’re stuck

 

Did you ever pick up a AGM compatible 12v battery charger?

Next time you visit the dealer, ask for a "service history" printout. You may have to prove ownership by supplying reg or title.

 

12V get that to hold 12.5 to 12.9 or so and you'll have something that's after stabilizing off charger and sitting.

SM-A715F ?

 

You need a 12 volt battery in the back of your car that after it's been on a charger and after it sat and stabilized like overnight or 4 hours it still reads 12.5 to 12.9 volts and if you leave your voltmeter plugged up and have your wife son or daughter flip the high beams on and the lights that battery should not drop below 10 volts while that load is on if it does the battery is no good it doesn't meet this criteria pretty much it's no good You can go play with it and put it on chargers and fiddle fart around till you're sick of it but the battery is probably bad Good luck

SM-A715F ?

 

A bad battery is one that has little ability to hold a charge for a period of time. Even a good battery won't instantly charge after a jump. What you saw was a surface charge that is meaningless without a load. That is why batteries are load tested, not simply measured for voltage. Hopefully you just have a bad battery. It is the most common electrical issue.

Yes a car stores codes in memory which will be there when someone reads them later.

fyi, Sams Club and others give you three years full replacement. If they can get you the agm equivalent your cost might be better than prorated at a dealer.

Finally a decent battery, even one that is discharged significantly, will show well over 14 volts when the charging system in the car is operating under Ready mode. Your charging system is in the inverter. It is capable of 50 or more amps into a discharged battery. The inverter should instantly raise the observed voltage. When that higher voltage is not there the car is either not in Ready, the inverter is bad or, most often, the battery is very bad dragging down the charging system.

 

Hi mel, I'm sorry you are having these car problems. Here are a few ideas based on my experience. There's at best a 50/50 chance any of them are right.

1. You will get a lot of advice about the problem being a bad 12v battery. While this is absolutely possible, I have NEVER found this to be the solution to the problem you describe. The 12v battery only powers up the various computers and as such doesn't need to be 100% brand new. To test this without buying an expensive Prius 12v battery you can get any good 12v battery that is well charged and first disconnect the ground wire from the Prius battery terminal, then carefully attach the good battery by way of jumper cables to the positive terminal and the negative/ground wire. Then try to start the car. You'll have to try to start twice because you "disconnected" the battery. In disconnecting the battery you will have also temporarily cleared the fault codes so again the car may start.

2. If the car actually starts (ie the regular combustion - ICE - engine starts) you can carefully disconnect the "good" battery and reconnect the ground wire to the original battery. Then leave the car running for a while.

3. If the car does not start try to note the level of charge of the hybrid/traction battery - how many "bars" do you see? If you only see one bar it's possible your "big" battery is at too low a level to be able to start the ICE engine. Since you've recently been driving I would guess this is unlikely - ie the big battery will still be able to start the engine. If your traction battery is really low you will need to charge it somehow. You can build your own "grid charger" to do this, but this gets a little complicated.

4. Before you do any of the above, check the oil level in the engine, and refill it as necessary. Again, this is not usually the end of the world even if the oil is low.

5. Most likely you will be able to start your car, and leave it running for a while - maybe 30-45 minutes.

6. If you get warning lights this will indicate that fault codes have been reset.

7. Go to Amazon a order a mini VCI cable. This is a device which you can hook up to the diagnostic port of the car. It comes with access to a bootleg copy of techstream which is the official Toyota code reader. If you have a junk laptop you can use that to install this hacked techstream. If you're not super paranoid you can risk installing techstream on your regular windows laptop. I've done this with zero problems.

8. If all this is over your head, you need to find a local, independent, prius expert who will have the ability to do all this. A dealer can do it, but the dealer will almost always suggest some very expensive repair(s) which don't solve the problem, and before you know it you will have replaced a lot of expensive, probably functional, parts. And still have problems.

9. Obviously this is quite a dilemma, especially with the insane level of used car prices now, so you can't just buy a cheap car, and take whatever time it takes to learn how to fix your prius. People here on PriusChat can give you an immense amount of help to do that, but the smartest ones will always ask you for the fault codes in detail because otherwise you are just guessing.

Good luck. As I said, this is all from my experience. I have 4 priuses. One runs. The others I can get to limp along if I do some of what I've suggested above. Smarter guys than me would have had the other 3 up and running.