Broke down 700 miles from home! Help!

If the dealer doesn't have an answer by next Friday, i'm going back to the dealer and dragging the car back here. I have a gut feeling that this is exactly what's going on and the tech working on it won't do a stupid thing if it's not in a flow chart or in a tech bulletin. The only definate answer we can get out of them is that it's not the aux battery, even though he's said that he's done multiple checks (again, it's been sitting in the outside lot this whole time). I worked in Alaska in the Air Force having to come up with my own solutions for electrical problems that weren't in any manual or guide book; You just need to get a little creative with how to trace a circuit, and that's all this car is; a buttload of circuits.

Are there any available schematics, diagrams or general electronic maintenance booklets available for this car? I'm half notioned to tell the service dept they don't know what the hell they're doing, but i'm not as inclined to do that until I have the car back.

 

There is a subscription site, starting $15/2days.

Another site for some hints about the diagnostics.
AUTOMOTIVE TECHNICAL ARTICLES

Anyway, it is almost impossible to trace wiring by the schematics unless you're a super technician of the Prius electronics.
The best approach is to connect the Toyota hand-held tester to the DLC3 port and to do the diagnostics.
A sample of the diagnostic screen is shown at page-16 of following article.
http://www.autoshop101.com/forms/Hybrid14.pdf

Ken@Japan

 

Suggest you call the service manager today and ask what is their plan for the car. If s/he cannot articulate a plan that makes sense to you, then save a week of time and drag the car back now.

Although your parents' car is high-mileage, as long as it hasn't been in an accident, flood, or subjected to rodent damage, then hopefully the wiring harness is in good shape and not contributing to the problem. I'm concerned that they have told you there is no communication between the ECUs and no DTCs to retrieve.

You will probably have to invest in an OBD-II code reader compliant with Toyota CAN, to have a chance of downloading whatever DTC might exist - once you figure out the comm problem.

 

This is the problem, the service manager was pitching the same company lines that the tech and asst. manager were using. According to them, the Toyota engineers are clueless as they've never seen this problem before and until they solve their power/comm issue they can't pull codes so the car can tell them what's wrong with it. The tech and asst. service manager were both completely puzzled over the fact that they're "100%" positive that the car has power, but there's no logic going between the devices.

Are there any wiring harnesses that run along the bottom side of the car? They did have an issue with some plastic paneling being sheared off from hitting a hedgerow or something, i'm not 100% what happened but Toyota replaced/reinstalled the panels.

Shoot, even if I did drag it back i'd need to buy two large floor jacks to get the car on and off the dolly; until they can turn the car on, it won't shift out of park to roll anywhere.

 

I can give you the full service manual. Send me an email with your email address, and I will give it to you gratus. If you have a multimeter and patience, you have a good chance of figuring it out, at least to the point where the power stays on. Then you may need a OBDII code reader.

 

PM sent, Thanks for the gesture. Lets hope the dealer can manage to figure this out, but you never know what can happen these days.

 

The only wiring that runs along the bottom is the high voltage cabling to the traction battery located in the hatch. That is covered by a translucent white plastic shield.

Consult the Technical Articles link at autoshop101.com for free Toyota hybrid tech training info.

The techinfo.toyota.com website previously cited by Ken contains (among other info) a New Car Features Manual which provides theory of operations not found in the repair manual. If you are interested in that, download the 2004 model year plus succeeding model years up to the year of interest.

As vertex is providing you with a .pdf version of the repair manual, then you should be good to go, regarding DIY.

Good luck.

 

Just received a call from the dealership, someone from Denver is coming here with a special tool and some expertise to try and solve the problem; Apparently they're suspecting the HV batteries to be the root cause, but he won't know anything until later today or tomorrow.

 

Interesting, glad to hear that outside help is flying in.

If the traction battery was the only problem, then DTC should be logged, such as DTC P0A80 (replace hybrid battery pack) and/or DTC P30xy where xy ranges from 11 to 24 depending upon which of the 14 battery module pairs is weak. So it will be interesting to see what the outside expert does to resolve the comm issue.

 

Sheez, this is crazy. First off, if the car completely lost power
at speed on the road and never successfully powered back on
again, how did it wind up locked in Park? The parking actuator
requires power to run, so if nothing's getting power it could
not have fired the pawl. But evidently it did.
.
Why isn't a tech crawling all over the thing with a meter and
a noid light isolating what's upstream of what? It's what they'd
do to any other car. What does the 12V rail do when attempts
are made to power it on to various states, such as ACC or IG-ON
besides regular READY? Does the accumulator pump run at all
if the brake pedal is pushed and held a couple of times? Has
anyone sat quietly and listened for various relay clicks when
trying to power various things on, and compare that with a
working car? The brief flash of the instrument VFD sounds
suspiciously like weak 12V that then dies down to maybe 8 or
less when a load is put on it; a dead CANbus with a good 12V
will cause the boxes around PRNDB to blink on and off, not just
flash once and die. [That's the car's way of trying to tell
you about horrendous communication errors.]
.
I've read the whole thread and don't feel like I've been told
the whole story yet, sorry... but having a schemo in hand is
certainly step 1 toward a fix.
.
_H*

 

The whole thing does smell fishy.

Tom

 

The problem is that the dealer isn't really doing a damn thing about it; They're on the phone with Toyota engineers, and the engineers will ask the field tech to check something then they'll call back later with another request. As stated earlier in the thread, the car hasn't been inside the shop for a single minute since we towed it over there, And the only item they could tell us was bad as of yesterday was a bad cell in the aux battery.

Here's where things get interesting. Yesterday afternoon, I got a call from the asst. service manager and he told me that the HV batteries had been drained to a critically low level, low enough that it "should" explain why the car won't start. They're suspecting bad gas had been pumped into the vehicle, and after looking at the timeline and my father's 'statement' on what happened right before the failure is pointing towards either an incorrect octane or contaminated gasoline being run through the engine causing the gas motor to fail, running the car on the HV battery until it died as well.

This is what really makes me upset though; to charge the HV batteries we have to pay $250 to have the charger kit shipped here from another location and then another $250 to actually charge the car. Their engineers have the idea that getting the HV batteries charged will solve the power issue and allow the car to electrically operate. Also, if bad gas is the prognosis we will have to replace the fuel bladder, pump, filter, lines and injectors.

Once I have more info, i'll let you know. For the previous poster, any lack of information is on the service department's end; i've relayed everything on here that they're telling us. I'm really disappointed in this service department, it makes me very discouraged to buy a Toyota from here. ever.

 

Absolutely. I didn't mean to imply that your posts were fishy, only that the whole situation was very odd.

Bad gas (not merely the wrong octane) could foul the fuel system and cause the ICE to stop, leading to a drained HV battery, but only if the driver restarted several times. The Prius shuts down to prevent this sort of eventuality.

The reason that the HV charger is expensive is that there isn't much call for using one. It's a very rare situation that requires a manual recharge of the HV battery.

Here is the odd thing: If the HV battery is low a code should be logged in one of the ECUs. The ECUs are powered by the 12V system, so they should work even with a low HV battery, at least once the 12V battery is charged.

Something still doesn't add up.

Tom

 

You're absolutely right, and while I don't want to start pointing fingers at the dealer they haven't taken a single step in the direction of creative troubleshooting, or even utilizing deductive reasoning to try and pinpoint the problem. Someway, somehow the battery managed to get drained and maybe due to the fact that it's drained will point to another problem with the car's fail safe systems, not just the idea that bad gas was put into the car. All of the direction that the dealer has been taking attributes to these engineers they've been talking to, nobody seems willing to get elbow-deep into this thing and find the problem.

According to the dealer, all of our power problems should be solved after charging the HV battery as far as getting the car to power up. Once that happens, they're confident they'll be able to electrically diagnose what the real problem is.

 

Thanks for the update. Your experience shows how risky it is to own a Prius, post-warranty.

If bad gas is an issue, I suggest you ask whether they can just disconnect the fuel line where it connects to the injector fuel rail in the engine compartment. Then apply 12VDC to the fuel pump located inside the fuel tank, to pump out the bad gas. That might avoid the expense of physically replacing the fuel tank (which contains the bladder, pump, and fuel filter.) The Toyota diagnostic laptop probably has a feature that allows the tech to run the fuel pump as needed.

I still don't understand why they can't retrieve DTC if a new 12V battery (assuming it is fully-charged) has been installed.

 

I don't understand either, they seem to have it set in their minds that they can't do anything until we spend $500 to charge the HV battery. the tech also seems to think that he can't get *any* gas out of the car until they can get electrics working again, which i'm also really scratching my head on.

Also, is it not possible to drain the fuel tank without operating the fuel pump? With the bad gas scenario, they're talking about needing to replace every fuel component from the bladder to the injectors due to 'contamination'. We called our dealer back home and they're saying that fuel component replacement is absolutely not necessary in this case. Is this ABQ dealer just trying to make their money on a situation that isn't as complicated as we thought?

 

It is not possible to drain the fuel tank, because the bladder within is sealed. So you have to run the fuel pump to drain the liquid out. Maybe the four injectors need to be replaced if contamination exists, but I see no reason to replace other fuel system components.

I can believe that the traction battery may have been depleted to the point where it needs recharging. However that should not impact the ability of the various ECUs to record and report DTC.

My guess is that you'll spend $500 to have the battery recharged, and the comm problem that prevents DTC retrieval will persist.

 

This is what I am also suspecting, I just got off the phone with the dealer back home in Kansas and they said the same thing; the lack of 12v power is a 12v issue, not a traction battery issue. THey also suggested a blown primary fuse, which I haven't been able to check and they don't seem keen on letting me poke around the car for myself. I'm starting to suspect we'll see a few more components on the car "needing" replacing the further along we go, this dealer/service dept is acting more fishy by the day.

 

Update:

after talking with our dealer back home, they suggested we call a specific Toyota customer service number and report everything that's been going on. We're supposed to get a call back from a prius technician/engineer, and the folks my mother talked with seemed very receptive of our problem. We'll see what comes of this, and if they confirm our suspicions then it'll be time to play hardball with the service department.