Question: can one bad battery blade prevent the HV from charging

Well if energy is not flowing across all the blades and not being accepted by all of those said blades modules and pins here we are so I guess you can't drive it so you're figuring was okay until it wasn't but yeah the thing is all in series these cells modules whatever you want to call them so when it runs the energy runs up on something that it doesn't like it stops moving gets held up by resistance ohm's law and all that and then you have a mess.

 

if it's bad enough, the whole battery is affected

 

It gets better than that, just one cell of the 168 in the battery can take the battery out. The car will protect the battery when it detects a cell failure.

 

Prius battery packs consist of electrical devices in series. The cells are in series within the blades, the blades are in series within the pack. Any complete failure along that path takes the whole thing out. It isn't just the cells, if any of the connectors between the blades fails that is all she wrote. In fact, that is pretty much what the battery disconnect switch does.

 

The traction battery management CPU disabled the charging function to protect the electronics. If you hook-up a Toyota scan tool; it'll tell you what parameter was violated, that cause the shut-down.

Hope this helps....