Really?!?

Glass cases.....NO.
Transparent cases......yes, probably.
But I haven't been in an office for maybe 20 years now and the power requirements for the new digital switches likely are a LOT less.
So I don't know what the batteries look like now.

 

and you did stay at a holiday inn

 

I always regret when we have put yet another PriusChat member through this same chorus of this same song.

Those original codes in post #1 were a perfectly clear and coherent indication of what the problem was. P3000, set in the HV ECU, means "go look at the codes in the battery ECU". P0A80, set in the battery ECU, means "this battery's block voltage differences have exceeded spec", and the P3012 even pinned down which block was out. That was the complete story from the start.

But still we had to put the OP through the usual detour:

(What did "all the other errors" in that sentence even mean? There weren't any codes suggesting a 12 volt battery problem. All the codes the OP had were "other" codes!)

So at last, five weeks and a couple hundred extra dollars later,

which was the plain straightforward meaning of the codes in post #1.

At least it's a comfort to see that the aux battery "was failing"

(however that was determined, which isn't mentioned in this thread), so at least one doesn't have to feel the replacement effort and expense was entirely wasted.

At the same time, if that judgment is correct and the 12 volt battery really was failing, we have another clear case where even a "failing" 12 volt battery did not mean there was anything "fake" about the reported codes.

That helps illustrate the piece that is missing from this kind of reasoning:

Even assuming a person's individual circumstances are such that a couple hundred can be dropped on an aux battery just because it's not an expensive "thing to try first", you get a decision tree with a better expected cost overall if you rank your choices at each step by their cost, weighted by their likelihood of solving your problem. If P(real) is the likelihood that your trouble codes mean exactly what Toyota's engineers programmed them to mean, and P(fake) is the likelihood that they are "fake errors" from a malfunctioning ECU (which is nevertheless perfectly functioning in every other way, such as transmitting the codes to your scan tool) ... because P(real) is very close to 1.0 and P(fake) is a very small fraction, $200/P(fake) is really a pretty costly branch of the tree for you to follow.

 

We still use batteries like the telco's use, in glass or plastic jars, at our power substations where I work. 61 cells equals about 130VDC. Each cell weighs about 400 pounds. We still do annual equalizing charges to rebalance cells and reduce sulfation etc. I don't see why some folks still believe "grid charging" does no good.

 

BECAUSE......those discussions are about an entirely DIFFERENT type of battery.
Different chemistry and different "maintenance" considerations.

 

Glad to hear it is working out for you. In the future if you need parts or advise Steve at autobeyours.com is a wealth of parts and info. He rebuilds gen 2 and actually all gens now.

 

The most likely explanation, I would guess, is that the dealer has some techs who are a bit green still.

It's a pretty common newb mistake to look up a code like P3000 (where I think the short "fortune cookie" in at least some sources is something like "battery control system malfunction") and think that means the battery ECU is malfunctioning, when it really means the battery ECU is just fine, is doing its job, and is reporting a malfunction of the battery.

Here on PriusChat we have to talk people out of that kind of misinterpretation fairly routinely. You would naturally want all dealer techs to already know better, of course, but they exist on a spectrum like everybody else. People with top-notch diagnostic skills get a lot of career openings besides auto dealer tech.

Did you happen to find out the rough age of the tech looking at the car? Sometimes if it's an older one, the dynamic is the old "these newfangled computers are nothin' but trouble, go haywire all the time, if there's any code about a computer of course it means the computer is the problem".

If it was a younger tech, it's probably just a simpler matter of inexperience.

I am guessing that it wasn't any kind of deliberate effort to pad the bill.

 

Took a look at the autobeyours.com website and saw a lot of broken links. Are they still in business with a crappy website or are they out of business?

 

And I am guessing that you are WRONG, at least partly.
There likely is no good way to test those modules so they have a "standard" recommendation to just replace them along with the battery.
And a little extra profit doesn't hurt either.

 

Hanlon's razor can be helpful a lot of the time. We know how easy it is to make those kinds of shoot-the-messenger mistakes when ECUs do their job and report issues, because people here on PriusChat make them all the time. Pros get a bit more training, but they aren't immune. Troubleshooting steps, and criteria for when ECUs might really need replacement, are in the repair manual.

Of course there's another way this kind of problem could result from a dealer's excessive focus on the bottom line. While technicians who are still green might be likely to make that kind of mistake, the dealership probably also has people who know better. But catching the mistake by having more time spent by senior techs reviewing and mentoring the green ones would cut into the bottom line. So if the dealership management could have decided to run things in a way that would have caught and corrected the misdiagnosis seen here, but instead decided not to as a way of saving money, that could be seen as another way for the misdiagnosis to be a consequence of greed, even though it's a different way than if they just said "add a couple ECUs onto the bill and see if the customer squawks."

 

Yes he is still in business. You are right, Not the best website.

 

I think I've found another follower of Occam's razor ?

I'm going to follow your posts for more common sense guidance in fixing things.

thanks

 

Another thought on the matter. I looked through my information system, and there are several TSB's out there for various concerns with the hybrid systems. The repair action is to replace the hybrid or HV battery ecu's in order to update the operating "software" (I assume these aren't field reflashable).

So it MIGHT be possible that when the dealer tech scanned the car, he found outdated version numbers and therefore recccomended ecu replacement.

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

Good point- different chemistries! Duh, why did I not think of that