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New ICE & traction battery for a 2005 with over 200K miles

Discussion in 'Gen 2 Prius Care, Maintenance and Troubleshooting' started by devprius, Apr 30, 2014.

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  1. devprius

    devprius /dev/geek

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    Luscious used to do a lot of traction battery replacements using used or rebuilt ones (including doing the rebuilding themselves, they had plenty of spare modules to use) for Gen I and Gen II's, but as the various generations have aged, and access to low-mileage packs has gotten harder to come by, they're now doing factory replacements. I can understand the reasoning behind that.

    I'm hoping the car will last at least another couple of years (20K or 30K miles). He can't afford to replace the car right now. We can afford to help him repair it, however. And by help, I mean loan the money.
     
    #21 devprius, May 1, 2014
  2. devprius

    devprius /dev/geek

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    Reading through the other threads, the fact that the ICE was starting to consume/burn oil isn't too surprising or out of the ordinary given it's age. I'd say it started using about a quart every 3K to 5K mile at around 150K miles.
     
    #22 devprius, May 1, 2014
  3. uart

    uart Senior Member

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    Yes I was somewhat skeptical about the low 2% figure from the 2014 consumer reports survey (lets call it 2% to 3% as the 2006 model stats were 3% and I don't expect much statistical difference). It's a very stark contrast to the 18% of failures in this site's online survey here: Hybrid Battery Survey-Gen2 Prius 2004-2009 | PriusChat

    The consumer reports survey was apparently of 1.1 million car owners (not dealers), estimated to include about 7000 prius owners, whereas our survey here will be hopelessly compromised by the fact that so many owners are drawn here specifically because they already have a battery issue. So overall I tend to trust the consumer reports data. As far as I can tell, their sample size is just big to have much chance of any large errors.

    As to the point of whether or not the CR survey data is consistent with the amount of battery rebuild business activity, yes that's a really good question. Assuming that the per year failure rate is increasing I'd estimate that the CR data implies about 0.7% per year current failure rate for out of warranty Prius. Given that there's about half a million 2007 and older in the US fleet, that 0.7% will still correspond to about 3500 failures per year. Seems like enough to support a fairly decent rebuild industry, though of course I can't say whether or not it's enough to account for the actual amount of rebuild activity.
     
    #23 uart, May 2, 2014
  4. JC91006

    JC91006 Senior Member

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    Well I know there's an entire bandaid rebuilding industry that's showing up on Craigslist. It's a case of buyer beware when buying a used Prius now with higher mileage/years. The R&R bad cells and put in replacements and charge a low $400. But surely that approach is only good for a very short term.

    If shops like Luscious garage is going away from rebuilding and installing new units now, there must be an issue of reliability on the rebuilds as well as a shortage of good used cells available in the marketplace.
     
    #24 JC91006, May 2, 2014
  5. devprius

    devprius /dev/geek

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    Update: new engine is in. Bad news is that the traction battery has to be replaced. Keeps throwing a code. One of the cells is way way way out of balance with the rest of them. We're going ahead with the replacement. Luscious thinks that the car will go another 10 years after this. I'm hoping they're right. They certainly have the experience to know.
     
    #25 devprius, May 6, 2014
  6. uart

    uart Senior Member

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    That's bad luck. I guess your son must have driven it (or tried let it crank) until the battery was really stuffed after the engine seized. Most of the time it protects itself, but we've had a few instances reported here where people have lost engine power (eg run out of fuel) and trashed the traction battery by over-discharging it.

    I think this is something that everyone with an older Prius needs to be aware of. That there's a chance of trashing traction battery if overly discharged due to loss of engine power (for whatever reason).
     
    #26 uart, May 7, 2014
  7. devprius

    devprius /dev/geek

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    When the car was newer, I ran out of gas several times and the Prius was very good at protecting the battery and preventing something like this happening. As the battery would run down, I went slower and slower, but I never lost the last battery bar, and it always fired right back up after some gas was put in. But, again, this is when the car was newer and the battery pack was obviously healthier.

    My son has learned a very harsh & expensive lesson. The engine seizing was a totally avoidable event. The battery dying was something that was eventually going to happen given it's age, but I suspect we could've forestalled it by at least a year. We've had a good talk about why things went wrong, what he could've done to avoid it, and going forward how to prevent something like this happening. Hopefully things sunk in sufficiently.
     
    #27 devprius, May 7, 2014
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