Looking to Buy a 2002, good idea?

Generally speaking, if the battery charge seems to rapidly go from empty to full and back again and you’re regularly getting average fuel economy that’s below 30 mpg in winter or below 40 mpg in summer, it means your traction battery is having problems and is getting close to worn out. Another potential sign of a weak traction battery is poor performance when trying to go uphill. If that is happening as well, I would suspect that the traction battery is not doing well and could need to be replaced relatively soon (possibly in the next few months to a year).

 

Each car shown is a specific amount of energy recovered by regenerative braking. The more you drive downhill (using brakes) and in stop and go traffic, the more of those car icons you should see. If you’re driving on roughly flat surfaces at a constant speed, you won’t see any. The symbols don’t tell you much about the health of the traction battery. They just let you know the regenerative brakes are working properly.

 

Each little car symbol is worth 50 watt hours (not kilowatt hours! ) Any time your regen braking has recovered that much energy, a little car is shown. (I think you can also get half little cars, worth 25 Wh.)

For a sense of scale, 50 Wh is about the energy needed to raise a one-ton weight 66 feet up. (Or a 1000 kg weight 18 meters up, if that sounds better.)

50 kWh would be like a one-ton weight raised 12½ miles.* If you could recover that much energy in regen braking, we'd really want to know where you were driving!


* I'm treating g there as the same as at ground level. At 12½ miles that's probably lazy of me.

 

I wouldn't waste the 200 bucks

 

there's no inspection checklist, and most dealers will fabricate money making repairs.
I'd invest in getting dr. prius working, tech stream or auto scanner, and the tools necessary to diy if you're so inclined.
if not, I'd start putting aside money for actual repairs, if and when necessary.

 

This all depends, how big are the hills? If you are going up and down mountains, you can expect it to move quite a bit even with a new pack, similarly if you are parked for 10 minutes with the AC on, it will seem like it's pulling quite a bit too.
If it's moving up and down the entire range in the course of a few a minutes going stoplight to stoplight on a flat road and the first hard drop wasn't within the first two minutes of driving, then that's a problem.
It might help to describe the driving conditions, how many miles and how much time(especially if AC is running and it's hot out) from full to empty on the battery gauge after you've driven beyond the first few miles. The way you've described the behavior can be interpreted differently to someone who's driven the 2nd gen Prius for awhile because 'somewhat quickly' can mean different things based on driving conditions and the fact that you are driving in a hilly region changes how much energy is pulled from the battery and regenerated versus a driver who might typically be doing gentle accelerations and regen on a 30mph flat road without AC.

 

Sounds pretty normal to me, climbing a hill or hopping on a highway with your foot all the way down usually brings you down a few bars. Usually it's bad if you run through the entire battery on an on ramp or it's empty to full from regen from a single off ramp every time. Occasionally the car will lose track of its battery level though so if it does a large jump from empty or full, usually after it's been parked awhile, that's not alarming to me. It's when it does that frequently that it's an issue.
The Dr. Prius app will give you a better idea though, the life expectancy test will have you manually push the battery to full and then slowly drain it and it will count the energy and give you a percentage.