My Prius lost its mind this morning

Got into my 05 Prius about 7:00AM - - it was cold in the garage - - the hi/lo thermometer showed a low of 38 deg. f. I punched the "ON" button (with my foot on the brake pedal) to start the car . The first thing I noticed was the "brake" light was lit (odd, I never use the parking brake) - - then the ABS light and the "icy road" light stayed lit, too. The right turn arrow was continuously lit dimly even though I had not signaled a turn. When I signaled a right turn, the signal was very rapid, perhaps 5 per second. I checked the parking brake by pressing and releasing it a few times - - no improvement, "BRAKE" still lit. I put it in drive and pulled out of the garage - - seemed okay. Pulled out on the street and noticed the climate control fan had turned off, even though I had the temp set for 70, and when I came to a stop light, the brakes required unusually high pedal effort. I turned around at a corner and drove back home to put the car back in the garage - - too many questions to keep driving it.

Around 10:00AM, I tried it again. Still bad, so I figured I should head for the Toyota dealership. I drove the car out onto the driveway in the sunshine and removed all my goodies from their various locations, expecting to leave the car in the repair shop for a few days. About a half hour later, I started it up - - oops - - no BRAKE, ABS or "icy road" signals - - turn signal works correctly again. Heater fan is running and brake pedal is normal, signifying energy recovery is back in operation. Damn - - an intermittent, probably due to the low temperature - - dash outside temp is showing 50 deg. f. now.

I bought this car with a "salvage" title, so I'm in for a non-warranty repair bill. Any ideas what went wrong, and what kind of an expense I can look forward to if this becomes a permanent failure?

Thanks, guys.

Reply to
Chuck Olson
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At 38F (uh, 3-ishC) you should not be having temperature-related problems. My Prius (2005 model) works fine at much lower temps, as I assume yours also used to, so some defect is now in control of your vertical and horizontal. One consolation: Toyota appear to have wired-in a lot of diagnostic gear; maybe the car is just waiting to be asked what the issue is.

Would it be insanely expensive to pay some Toyota garage with a Prius specialist to diagnose the problem? They should have the necessary toys.

Or ask in a specialist Prius group on the Web? (ISTR PriusChat was well infested with Priusgeeks.)

Or ask Ray-O. ;-)

Reply to
Andrew Stephenson

I used to work for a Used Car Dealer where we specialized in "Salvage Titles".

We fixed up all kinds of cars; Fords, mostly, and then the boss grudgingly got into Toyotas (Why so difficult? You can buy 2-3 Escorts for the price of one Corolla, Camry or Honda...then there's the Parts Price issue!) But he knew Toys sell well, so he bit the bullet.

But the 2 Prius' we sold were sold for third parties, NO Salvage title. Because of the complexity of the system, it was just too damn difficult to deal with a Salvage Prius.

It would help to know, if *YOU* know, what kind of damage the car had that rendered it Salvage.

Dealing with ANY Salvage car is iffy, I will admit, we had some cars on the lot I would steer people AWAY from, but for the most part the repairs were done well. I'm wondering, was it Flood Damage?

Reply to
Hachiroku

sounds like wiring damage or computer damage.

Reply to
Dr Corey

wonder why... flood damage? bad accident?

Reply to
SoCalMike

I am not that familiar with the Prius' controls, but I'd suspect an initialization, or "boot up" problem. Depending on why the vehicle was sold as salvage, the list of possible causes is probably very long. If it was in a wreck, then there may be a loose connection somewhere, and if it was in a flood, then there may be a corroded connection somewhere.

Reply to
Ray O

Thanks to all who offered advice.

I have a slight update on the problem. It seems turning on the headlights precipitates the problem if it starts out behaving normally in the daytime. However, turning them off again does not immediately restore normal operation. I have to stop, turn the car off and then back on again with headlights off. Suspecting it may be associated with my 13-month-old 12v battery's condition (high internal resistance or low state of charge), I put a charger on it and found it was very nearly fully charged. The charging current dropped from 5A to less than 1A in just a few minutes as I watched, so at least the charging facility in the car appears to be working normally. So then still suspecting a low energy reserve or high internal resistance, I looked at the battery voltage as I turned the headlights on. Monitoring it at the engine compartment fuse box, immediately after engine shutoff in PARK the voltage went from 13.99 with headlights off to 13.95 with headlights on, according to my Fluke 87 DMM - - drop-off doesn't appear to be excessive.

The salvage title came about because of a collision in Santa Cruz, CA which, according to the seller, was not significant enough to even deploy the air-bags. He said they pretty much only had to replace sheet metal. I believe the damage was concentrated in the right front area, but it didn't even crack the windshield. The radiator shows no bruising at all. It's a mystery to me how such superficial damage can result in declaring the car a total loss while it's capable of almost 100% recovery with sheetmetal replacement. Whether this is the whole story or not, I have no idea, but up to now I've been pretty happy with it.

I had the car inspected by my local dealership after I got it, and they restored a couple of connections that had been missed in putting the car back together, but judged it was in pretty good shape with about 4000 miles on it. I've been driving it since August 2005, and it served perfectly through the 2005 cold season and so far this season driving it at night about three times a week, but now with only about 13,000 miles on it, this pops up.

So there you have its history as I know it.

Chuck

Reply to
Chuck Olson

Okay, the pro motor engineers here can correct me if I'm wrong; but it seems like you have there a natural and friendly reason to return to that dealership, say this weird effect has come up and ask if they'd take a further look at the car. (Smiling nicely.)

Reply to
Andrew Stephenson

I'm not exactly a "pro" any more, but that would be my advice. If the car was in a wreck, I'd suspect a poor or disconnected ground point somewhere or a chafed wiring harness somewhere.

Reply to
Ray O

Never once have you read the manual, eh?

Yeah, you know how to drive a car. Even something as technologically weird as a Prius. You have absolutely no need to open the owner's manual, right?

Reply to
Elmo P. Shagnasty

No, that's the time to go back to the selling dealer and ask nicely, explain the symptoms, and have them check for pinched or broken wires in the area of the repairs again. See if you can get the same body guys and Mechanic that fixed it the first time to look at it again, they may remember something that was bugging them but "checked out okay" the first time.

But IMHO they were still lying to you somewhere, or to be charitable they didn't tell you the complete truth - Insurance companies DO NOT total out cars and give salvage titles over simple quarter-panel body damage, period.

It had to have been smacked pretty hard, and the insurer may have suspected damage to the Hybrid System equipment which would have been seriously expensive to fix - so they bailed on the car.

The people who put the money into buying the car and fixing it up (after it was totaled) played craps to see if they could fix it up without spending a fortune, and come out ahead.

They only total out cars when the repair costs approach the replacement value of the entire car plus the scrap value of the wrecked car. And that usually happens when the frame is badly bent to where the cabin shell needs to be pulled out, or the airbags get popped - That's a good $5K to replace all the airbag parts, and that usually tips the scale. Plus the airbags often break the windshield and there's another $500.

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Reply to
Bruce L. Bergman

Doubt reading the owners' manual back and forth would help with his experienced problems! Maybe the huge 3" thick OEM repair manual and a few grand worth of SSTs would but surely not the measley owners' manual.

Reply to
Wolfgang

I know for a fact it would.

Reply to
Elmo P. Shagnasty

Pretty good, Ray. It was a bad ground (EA or EB in the wiring manual), on the "right side fender apron", and a burnt out right turn signal lamp. Evidently the bad ground injected a few volts where there shouldn't be any, and various systems depending on that ground got upset. Total charge for finding the bad ground and open lamp $366. So I guess I got off relatively cheaply. The Toyota technician felt the ground was badly installed on replacement sheetmetal in the salvage repair of the vehicle.

The operator's manual mentioned the rapid turn signal if a lamp was burnt out, so Elmo P. Shagnasty had a valid criticism.

Thanks, all for your suggestions.

Chuck

Reply to
Chuck Olson

(patting self on back) I had the advantage of years of experience working on cars that dealers had problems fixing.

Bad grounds are not that uncommon after body work has been done. Body shops sometimes apply more paint on a body panel than the factory normally does, and the extra paint acts as an insulator, keeping the ground wire from getting good contact with the metal.

It was a bad ground (EA or EB in the wiring manual), on

You're welcome!

Reply to
Ray O

HOLY CRAP!!!! $366 to connect a ground wire and install a light bulb?!?!?!

Reply to
Hachiroku

I'd bet most of the charge was for time spent on diagnosis and finding the cause of the problem. I remember working on a truck that had a rattle that the dealership spent 12 hours chasing. After a test drive, I found it in under 2 minutes under the hood and fixed it by sticking a piece of weatherstripping under the rattling electrical connector.

Reply to
Ray O

Yeah, especially grounds. THey can be tough.

In my '80 Corolla, in '82 I stopped for a cup of coffee. I set the parking brake, and went to get out of the car and it tried to lurch forward to a concrete wall. GOOD thing I set the brake! Damn, I forgot to shut the engine off! THEN, I looked in my hand and saw the key...

It was drizzling, and I had left the wipers on INT. The ignition wasn't grounding properly and grounded through the wiper circuit! I learned this from a Tech at Brother's in Hartford. I reached into my parts bin, grabbed a #12 nut, bolt and lockwasher and at lunch removed the original grounding screw (which had been over-tightened at the factory) and replaced it. The fuse box wasn't grounding properly and would follow any path to ground it could.

Good thing that car didn't have airbags!

Reply to
Hachiroku

Somewhat in the spirit of Ray-O's response: this reminds me of a really old (early 60s) joke in a UK newspaper, which I shall try to translate for our foreign and PC readership...

We are in the living room of a house. House-occupant is staring, aghast, at a TV-repair-person, who is standing by a TV set, whose back is off exposing many complex innards. (Nowadays, two teensy plastic thingies but this was when Valves ruled the Earth after trashing the wimpy dinosaurs, so it Really Looked The Business.)

H-O: to fix the TV? But you only kicked it!

T-R-P: Ah, to kick it. Knowing _where_ to kick it costs the rest.

(This worked better in the happy days when one was allowed to say "Housewife", "TV Repairman" and "Five pounds".)

-- Andrew Stephenson

Reply to
Andrew Stephenson

I heard a story about a Jag in England where the owner sold it because no-one could find the rattle. New owner found a coin in the ash tray.

Reply to
FantomFan

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