Master Warning Light

This problem has happened to others. The guys at the tint shop left doors open for a long period, which means the interior lights drained the small 12V battery. Given the age of your Prius, the battery was probably close to being dead, and this finished it.

You need a new battery. You can do it yourself, or pay the shop. The Prius takes a funny size, so if you do it yourself, take a look at the postings about that on this site.

Tom

 

"Well other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the Play?"

You will have to drop a note of thanks to the tint shop, of course the battery was already on its last legs.
Consider it a "Mercy Draining."

How did the tint come out. Did you do the front windows, and if so to what level?

As far as the battery, you should be able to find one MUCH cheaper than that, and drop it in yourself.

Good Luck

 

Yes, the service instructions relative to engine and hybrid vehicle ECU reprogramming require a fully-charged 12V battery to start the process. If the battery voltage were to sag during the reprogramming that might ruin the ECU beyond repair.

It is not necessary to physically expose the battery to measure the voltage. The tech probably measured the voltage via the OBD-II port. You can measure the voltage by exposing the positive dedicated jump start terminal in the main relay/fuse box near the inverter and measuring from that terminal to a good ground point, such as one of the nuts securing the top of the front strut mount.

After your car has been off for a couple of hours, try measuring the battery voltage with the car IG-OFF. Then turn on the headlights, see how bright the lights are, and measure the battery voltage with that load applied.

It would not be surprising if you need a new 12V battery if your car really only has 8K miles. That implies it had been driven only <2K miles per year, certainly not enough to keep the 12V battery charged and in good condition. You should be able to buy the correct GS battery from your local Toyota dealer's parts dept for around $160. If the price is much higher than that, then I suggest you call around to the various dealers in your geographic area to see if you can do better.

 

Of course, the Prius takes a sealed battery, with unique sized posts, and a provision for an external vent tube

Possibly a better battery is the Optima conversion from Elearnaid

Parts kit for installing Optima battery on 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 & 2009 Prius

But it will probably cost you more than the GS battery from Toyota

Note: always fully charge a replacement battery before installation, especially a Prius battery

 

My advice is to put your battery on a trickle charger overnight and see whether a battery that can start your vehicle can be rehabbed (its not clear to me you've already done this) . Just because I'm curious and because I have the experience dealerships go for whatever will profit them the most. It is an AMG battery which does charge slower I believe than the standard non-AMG types.

 

I'll ditto the weak 12v battery hypothesis even with 12.5 v showing currently. Mine did that -- wouldn't start after having a slow drain all night, 12V battery was reading 9V or so. But would charge right back up and pass that test for voltage drop with lights on. I haven't changed my battery yet -- it's not that dead, ... yet. It's on my to-do list.

The only way to know for sure would be to replicate the incident and check your battery voltage when the car won't start. And you'd have to have a way to check the voltage before you started the car. But given the circumstances, it's a fair bet that a) it wouldn't start because there had been a long slow drain that dropped the voltage too far, and b) your battery isn't quite deteriorated enough yet to flunk the "voltage drop with lights on" test.

 

12.5 volts is not a fully charged battery.

Tom

 

Then what is...? And how long after engine shut-down?

Starky

 

mine showed 12.1, but could not power the scantool at the dealership for long enough to perform a brake bleed.

power during an ECU reprogram is critical. otherwise, it will fry the ECU. the dealership won't like having to pay for another one of those because they screwed up the first one because of a low 12v battery.

 

Uh, flash memory chips generally only need the same supply voltage whether being programmed or not, and their supply voltage is generally 5V or 3.3V. There ought to be a voltage regulator inside the ECU anyway to pull down from 12V and smooth out the supply - no computer electronics runs as 12V, only the drive motors in disk drives. If there's enough power to boot the ECUs up, there's likely to be enough to program them.

I'm responsible for update programs on Windows CE-based mobile devices, though the OEM software does the flash programming; Motorola/Symbol permit flash programming with 90% charge on the relatively small 3.7V lithium-ion batteries. The problem is ensuring that the programming software doesn't fail half-way through - the flash memory isn't damaged by losing power, but half a firmware program won't boot or run correctly.

If the dealer does brick it, it's on them to swap out the ECU. I'd be inclined to attach a bench power supply to run the car's electronics while upgrading firmware, you can then be sure that you've got enough power.

 

the 12v battery supplies the power to the scantool. so if there's not enough power, the scantool dies in the middle of flashing the ecu. hence, the programming software fails. as you said.