My Prius just quit running

[upfisk]

A couple days ago I'm driving my 2005 Prius and it suddenly quits running. The steering felt heavy, and I noticed the red triangle is lit. Pulled over in a not so good spot and started the car again, it starts and runs fine. I am now trying to head for a better spot for a tow, the car runs for a minute and shuts off again and we're now running on battery to a better spot. I restart the engine and now it runs 30 seconds before shutting off and the battery is down to 1 purple bar. Now the red guy with the balloon in his lap is lit. Then the check engine light begins to glow. The MFD screen has the red triangle and the check engine light showing. The car has about 60 miles on a full tank of gas, overall the car has 31K and the 36 month warranty just expired 7 days ago. Eventually, we towed the car to the dealer and rolled it off the haul trailer. Thus far, the dealer says the car is "spitting out more fault codes than the KGB". Any similar experiences, advise?

[donee]

Hi up...,

You need to provide the DTC codes for anybody on here to help you.

First thing to do in your area, in that vintage car is to clean the throttle body.

The Powertrain, minus Hybrid system has a 60 month, 60000 mile waranty. The hybrid system has a 100000 mile waranty. It will probably be fixed under waranty, unless you dropped a 1 on that 31 K miles (131K miles?).

The main thing to worry about is that you did not take the battery down so low, that its either damaged, or needs to be recharged for the car to use it. Its generally not a good idea to use battery as a backup unless your only going a few hundred yards, and/or manuevering to a safe stoping point. IE, emergency usage only.

[upfisk]

The dealer hasn't yet provided the codes. They said they had never seen so many fault codes at once. The tractor battery was still showing 1 purple bar. It wasn't enough to move the car at that point, but a downhill run helped load the car onto a auto hauler trailer. Nope, the car is only 31,152 miles old, kinda young for a 36 mo/36K warranty. The Prius Roadside Ass(tance) refused to tow the car anywhere as the warranty was 7 days expired. We had to provide the towing as the nearest Prius dealer was a $400 tow.

[fruzzetti]

It sounds like fuel is just not reaching the engine in the necessary amounts to fire the engine.

When my MkI Prius ran out of gas, it would throw up EVERY warning and error it possibly could, and the behavior was just as you describe: it would start, run for about 20 seconds to one minute, then kill; repeating the process would buy me more time.

Since you have a full tank of gas, I would suppose either your gauge is wrong and there is no fuel, or you aren't getting enough fuel to the engine. I bet it's a simple fix: cleaning something out.

~ dan ~

[galaxee]

they need to tell you what codes they have so far. otherwise we're all making shots in the dark.

[Patrick Wong]

Since you don't have access to the codes, I will stick my neck out and guess that the root cause is an inverter coolant pump failure. This caused the DC to DC converter in the inverter to overheat and voltage on the 12V bus to sag. This caused the power steering to fail (resulting in the heavy steering effort you noticed).

When you restarted, the 12V battery was marginal so it could not keep voltage on the 12V bus at a reasonable level. This resulted in the SRS system registering a fault (the warning light with the man & the red balloon.) I'm surprised that you didn't see brake and VSC warning lights also come on.

An inspection will confirm whether or not the inverter coolant pump indeed has failed (if working you can hear it sound like an aquarium pump - located near the driver's headlamp, and you can see fluid turbulence in the inverter coolant reservoir.) If so, then once this pump and the 12V battery are replaced, your car should be back to normal.

[upfisk]

Patrick, you are right the further cascade of warnings the car even threw up the VCS light, but didn't get the brake light. The car definitely had gas, I took on 8 gallons about 60 miles before the sudden quitting. There are no fluids showing anywhere, I looked for engine oil leaks or radiator leaks. No smell of gas, all the pips are showing on the gas gauge, so I don't believe that the car ran out of gas. I'll ask the dealer about the inverter coolant pump on Mon.

[V8Cobrakid]

I've experianced this around 43k miles. My pump still works though.

the dealership wanted to charge me way too much $$$ to look at it. I walked away, check over everything myself, and decided the car was still ok.

I'll have to take another listen to make sure she's still kicking. I did average extremely low (29mpg) on a long distance trip recently. The traction battery was low and warm. (i wish i had a scanguage)

[galaxee]

the codes, if you can post them, will tell the whole story.

if you did not lose braking power (or hear the brake power-loss warning buzzer that sounds when the backup power is used) and were able to start the car again, then there was at least sufficient 12v power to run those things.

[paprius4030]

I wonder if you just got a real bad load of gas. Water could plug up the fuel filter and cause the car to run out of gas.