Prius sat for 4 months, battery is dead - how to restart?

Without a 12V battery you will not be able to start the Prius properly, so this is the first thing you need to do.


If errors appear, then you need to diagnose the systems.

 

Have you used this hybrid before?

When the car is standing still for a long time, problems can appear in different places. If something goes wrong, you can contact the forum for help.

 

You can simply jump start the car and see if there are other problems, it should be able to run but might give you a battery error. Chances are your big HV battery will probably have issues as well (depending on the age of that battery)

 

Just go to costco and buy a battery for $200. The installation is simple and it should fix your car. If you have the time to remove and install a friend's battery, you should just install a new one for $200 and call it a day. VSC will flash if you run over uneven pavement, it is a normal characteristic of this car.

 

IMHO; just jump start it - rather than play musical battery swap or replace it. The car will run strange for a few hours or days, while the sensors recalibrate themselves, due to the battery issue and lost ECU settings. You may even get a few phantom errors. Erase them and see if they come back after you've make sure the battery issue has been solved.

Hope this helps....

 

I had my 2004 Prius sit for 3 years and the 12 volt battery even with trickle charge eventually became very weak. But anyways I bought a AGM battery from Autozone - they have two versions..one for non-smartkey and one with smartkey. But upon getting it started I encountered some faults like error display but repeat starts cleared that up as well as a little test drive helped. I lost the use of my Smartkey totally so I had to reprogram them but that was easy for Smartkey cars not like the non-smartkey where you have to go through the "Chicken dance" routine. But if you borrow your friends battery..it will not hurt his car so that may be the bargain option if your not sure as to what condition your car turned into. Its a gamble but its your call - Good Luck !

 

Is the car still running on the tank of 4 month old gasoline? It might run better with a new tank of gas. Perhaps throw a bottle of Techron in too, to try to clean up whatever may have stuck on the injectors and elsewhere in the fuel system while no gasoline was moving through the system.

Unused cars are like magnets for rodents. Some of the suggestions below reflect that.

Check all the fluid levels. Check the air filters for the motor and the cabin - there may have been rodents in there making holes are storing nuts.

Maybe clean the throttle body and MAF as well. If you're going to do one you might as well do the other at the same time.

I wouldn't think the spark plugs would care much about sitting for four months, at least once they had been running for a few seconds. The coils also won't care if they sat unused. If there were rodents under the hood some wires might be chewed though.

That error code relates to the catalytic converter. Maybe a family of roasted rodents and their nest partially clogging it downstream from the matrix in the cat?

 

That's basically just someone compiling a shopping trip for you. From the product description:

This the genuine Toyota Prius 2004-2009 tune up service kit. We have put together the oil filter, drain bolt gasket, engine air filter, cabin air filter, 4 spark plugs, and wiper blade refills. NOTE the refills only work with the original Toyota wiper blades. Please contact us to verify fitment if you are not sure.

 

don't buy anything critical from amazon, it's all chinese counterfeit junk. get spark plugs etc from an online toyota dealer

 

Or a bricks-and-mortar dealership, they'll have all this stuff. If you've got another transportation option.

 

Back before we sold our Gen 2, it sat for a few years, and I agree that the main battery will probably be a trouble point. By the time we tried to jump ours, not only was the aux battery depleted but so was the main. Long story short, we tried jumping for a long time and couldn't even get an interior light to flicker on.

 

The interior light is the responsibility of the 12V battery.

 

Exactly. I'm pretty sure that the 12v had been done for quite awhile by that point. We didn't ever replace it after that situation because we sold the car not long afterwards.