TRIANGLE OF DEATH!! help please...

If your mechanic found no serpentine belt then your water pump would not have been cooling the engine and no matter the time of year you need the water pump to be cooling the internal combustion engine even though it does not run as much as a regular ice car. So that is a big problem Yes you have a serpentine belt and a 2004 to 2009 Toyota Prius that turns your water pump that in itself once you reach an overheat condition I believe there's a little light or something that comes on or the red triangle would come on to let you know that something is wrong The red triangle is a master control light it lights up to alert you that other systems have found problems please see the lights on the dashboard they're usually red and or orange such as the ABS VSC traction control the! Things like this so obviously something happened your mechanic did not find the belt therefore your water pump wasn't working and I would say there's a very good chance you have destroyed an engine not just the head gasket but damaged possibly deeply internally and so given that it's a 1NZ Toyota motor they are very plentiful and upstate New York you should be able to buy a whole engine transmission attached to a car still with lower mileage than yours for a few hundred dollars probably they're all over the place I used to live in upstate New York that engine should be plentiful in your state as the cars are all destroyed from rust engines don't die from rust so should not have a problem finding one of the cost you want to pay could be a problem because well people have lost their minds generally here where I live this model engine is so plentiful more than a few hundred dollars would be the norm unless you had some very serious documentation and even then you'd have no clients to sell the engine to I have one sitting here in my yard as a spare ready to go I'll probably never use it because this is extremely rare I would know before the car lost its belt that was about to happen because well that's just the way I roll I can't imagine not having a water pump belt or having it slung off or broke on any of my Toyotas we just don't roll like that That's something that gets checked at minimal every few years on the Prius before I travel in any of my cars I lift the hood check the oil look at the fluids before I plot my happy rear end in that car and sit down to drive 500 mi I'd like to know I have a very good shot of getting there I have never had to sit on the side of the road with a broken down Toyota in my life and there's always that I don't want to start now Just not knowing that you had a water pump belt well here we are. A few more months with this car is probably going to mean a new engine in upstate New York is the car worth that generally not.

 

Sorry, but there is probably no simple solution. Expert, ethical Prius mechanics are hard to find. Unless you find one, in your shoes I would consider this car passed its viable life. I would focus all my efforts on finding a tolerable replacement vehicle. Also no easy task in today's car market. Start by asking all family friends and everyone you meet. Be very wary of being sold a junk ripoff.
Sorry again, but reality is hard. Persistence can yield results. Good luck.

 

Every time I see a story like this, I really wish somebody had read the trouble codes, the only way of knowing why the triangle has lit up, before doing so much other stuff, and I lament having been too late to help.

 

You still need an expert, ethical mechanic/shop to replace the engine.
At your car's age and mileage many more large expensive items are also prone to failure.

The "engine" is the internal combustion engine. It and the electric motor provide motive power. They do this via the "transmission" which is way more complex than a normal automatic transmission.

Again, expert, ethical mechanics who actually understand these items and these cars, are rare. Throwing money and parts at the car without such an expert is unlikely to yield more than fleeting positive results.

 

That kind of depends on how you look. In terms of mechanical complexity and part count, it's a whole lot simpler than a normal automatic transmission. The "more complex" comes in if you want to really understand what it's doing, which leads you into AC electronics and vector math and Clarke and Park transforms that most people don't think about when wrenching on a car.

But there's a lot of wrenching on a car you can do without having to grasp the theory behind the things you're unbolting and bolting up. Even understanding the "normal" automatic transmission leads you into hairy hydraulics and fluid dynamics and stuff that nobody really thinks about to unbolt or bolt up a transmission.

 

In New York state pretty much any job shop will be able to swap an engine indoor transmission into a Prius and very quick short order are you up near Westchester?.

 

Oof, I was out breath mid third sentence

 

You don't have to understand anything to do this in your driveway just unbolt the mess and drop it in if you're changing the engine and transmission you can pick it up as an assembly and drop it in although that's pretty rare these transmissions are pretty stout and seeming leave the motor generators inside of them are pretty stout also I don't recall replacing any transmissions and I've read about it very few times although it is just like taking the transmission out of any front wheel drive car You're not going to take it apart you're just taking it out to replace it and the one you set out on the ground if you want to pull that apart and have fun with it and see what's all about tear it up.

 

If the car overheated badly enough to destroy the motor it is likely to have cooked other things under the hood. At least that is how it usually works on other vehicles. My daughter did that to a Protege5, which got hot enough to discolor the paint on the top of the hood, and it was just one problem after another after that. In that case too the serpentine belt failed, which disabled the water pump and alternator. At least it had a temperature gauge, but she ignored it. (You can lead a horse to water...) In that case the motor didn't fail at the start, since the lack of a working alternator limited the damage to how long she could drive on just the battery. Only the radiator (melted) and some hoses were completely trashed at the start. But soon after the head gasket went, the timing belt needed to be replaced, the rear seal went, the water pump went, the battery died, and so on and so on.

Anyway, this is why if I travel more than a few miles from home an OBD2 reader and a smartphone with the software to read it is in the car. Otherwise there is just no way of knowing what to do in the event of a red triangle (other than pull over immediately).