Is my traction battery going bad?

That's the thread I followed yesterday with no positive results. But thanks for the input and encouragement that it can work. I'll go through it again today to ensure I didn't miss something or make a mistake.

One problem is some of the steps don't work. For example he said to go to the Device Manager where you'll find two failing devices in yellow to modify. I had no such failing devices. He also mentions using WINRAR which I didn't seem to need as everything was already unpacked in dropbox.

I am a very tenacious guy when it comes to software issues (spent 40 years working mostly in software). I'll keep banging away at it.

 

Thank you. I'll follow that instruction.

 

Ah. Now sitting in the car I realize I did yesterday follow the instructions to manually install the alternate drivers. I'll do it again though.

 

Okay I had to abandon the 64-bit work. After five hours and many fails it isn't going to work. So I've loaded virtualbox. The only stand alone OS I have is ubuntu. Does TechStream work in ubuntu? Is there a unix based version I can download?

I have access to XP but not until Saturday. I see TechStream runs in W7/8. Does it run under XP?

 

Great. Thanks. Now I have to wait until Saturday when I should have the XP OS in hand. Not too bad a wait considering the TechStream and cable arrived a week early.

Another strange behavior in the Prius today. Under normal conditions we rarely see green charge bars, only when going down the 1/2 mile long hill near our house.

Today we saw full charge, both green bars, several times over a 15 mile trip. The trip consisted of mostly 35-45 mph country roads, and an elevation rise from 750' to 1200'. This just adds to the odd behavior and under 40 mpg recent results. We are now on our third tank of gas with the car showing under 40 mpg. Prior to that, on the 4th tank of gas and previous, we constantly had 45-47 most of the time.

I'm anxious to get a look at the HV battery with TechStream.

 

No warning lights, and no codes from the service connector on the Scangauge II

 

Well after much fooling around trying to get the cable/software to work with Windows 8.1 64-bit I gave up and loaded VirtualBox. I then fetched a 32-bit XP OS from my son, loaded it, and finally was able to connect TechStream to the Prius. However...

About mid-day yesterday the Prius mpg jumped back up into the 40s. We had two full tanks, about 500 miles which were 35 mpg or under, almost unheard of for our car (only twice in 7 years and we could explain those incidents). Then 1/2 way through the third tank of low readings we noticed the car was behaving normally again; the average mpg is up to 42+ mpg even with the first 1/2 tank being lousy. By the time I had gotten the cable and TechStream to run the car had returned to normal behavior.

All HV battery readings, in fact all readings, seem to be normal now. Something strange is going on. You can't fix it if it ain't broken. All I can do at this point is monitor the car and connect up the cable and laptop if it starts acting up again.

What a bunch of nonsense this has been. Of course I'm happy to see the normal HV battery behavior, but now I'm wondering what the heck is going on with this car.