YOu won't get good answers unless you post ALL of the details. It is possible that the fault in the brake system makes it "think" that the brakes are not functional.......and with non-working brakes, I can easily see that it might not let you drive it.
... and nowhere is that more true than a Gen 1. For the Gen 2 and later Prii, the communication network in the car is primarily CAN, an industry standard that is widely supported by scan tools. In Gen 1, Toyota had not adopted CAN yet, and of all the ECUs in the car, some of them talk ISO9141 ("K-line"), some talk BEAN (a Toyota proprietary network), some AVC-LAN (another Toyota special), and some of the ones sharing the K-line talk using different protocols or different baud rates, so whenever the scan tool is talking to one of them, anything the others said would look like gibberish. Toyota's Techstream software knows the dances it needs for talking to all of those ECUs (which I'm pretty sure in some cases involves passing messages to them through other ECUs). It's pretty much Mission: Impossible for most third-party scan tools. And that's why the count-light-blinks method is especially useful in Gen 1. Most of Gen 1's ECUs participate. That number drops off over the generations; by Gen 3 you can still get blink codes from the brakes, TPMS, and I think SRS, but that's about it. In Gen 1 you can pretty much get blink codes from everything except the HV ECU and battery ECU. Those two will only talk to a scan tool.
The people on this board are not your problem. A bunch of strangers giving their time and knowledge freely, and you can't even explain your problem clearly, and then get mad at people for trying to help. My last words: good day to you.
here is a photo of my dash showing to help Sloan24 spot the "Ready" note above the transmission position indicator
Is the ready light on all models in all countries? I know on other vehicles Dash clusters can be totally different in other countries.
I am also in California but have worked on vehicles from Other countries. Just trying to give the poster the benefit of the doubt.
If the OP is ever heard from again, maybe there will be a pic or video of the dash, and then we'll know.
If there is no READY indicator and it can be driven it is not a prius, someone attached prius badge to something else.
I am sure its a Prius but as a gen1 the engine always starts at the beginning. The op is likely not Prius oriented as is the case with a lot of owners.
If somebody wanted to Prius-badge a non-Prius for the lulz, what's to stop them, say, in a real Prius taking the combination meter out and cutting the trace that lights up the READY? The combination meter is very easy to access in Gen 1. Of course I'm not seriously suggesting either of those things really happened.
