Headlights

Welcome to PriusChat. You will find all you'll ever need to know about your Prius here, lots of very nice folk, only too willing to share their collective experience and vast knowledge of all things Prius-related, of course, sometimes you have to use search! I see you have the touring edition, so I expect that your headlights are HID, which are famous for behaving as you describe, I'll leave you to get on with your search! Have fun!

 

If you find the search feature here on this site to be inadequate, using google will bring up just about every post here in Prius Chat and elsewhere that will pertain to your "key words".

As Wil said, HID headlamps do have history of acting the way you describe. Sorry, I have halogen's so can't say much of anything else.

Best of luck to you and "Welcome to Prius Chat"

 

Start by replacing the HID headlight. If the car still has a problem in that area then replace the headlight ballast. Do not continue to operate the headlights with that condition persisting as repeated headlight starts will strain the ballast.

 

Sounds like a possible igniter/ballast or connection issue. This may be above your head and you certainly don't want to work around/with HID components if you don't know what you are doing. You could kill yourself by touching the high voltage stuff. If you do decide to work with it, of course make sure everything is off and for extra protection, disconnect the battery.

Make sure the bulb is securely attached to the plug and no corrosion or other damage to the connector exists. If the 10 minute shut down is a constant thing, sounds like you just have a bad ballast. Possibly overheating going into protection (shut down) mode. This can just be normal wear/tear of the ballast and stuff that keeps it cool (thermal material) has possibly worn away inside.

Replacement parts are probably cheap on eBay.

 

Has anyone tried downgrading from the HID to regular bulbs. My wife's 2007 has the HID bulb and the POS is constantly going through bulbs, which are not cheap, and a pain in the nice person to replace... I'm sure it's the ballasts now that are bad, but the difference in brightness is not worth the hassle of replacing bulbs and buying ballasts. My 2006 has the same non HID bulbs since 2010..