Complete loss of power, Part II

A few days ago I posted a thread about losing power on a steep hill climb with a cold engine. I replaced the hybrid battery and all seemed well. A few days later, the problem occurred again--bummer. (The car has 120K miles and has spent most of its life in a hot and mountainous environment, and I knew the hybrid battery was failing, so that's not a problem. I was just hoping the one solution would solve two problems.)

The car starts the climb OK, gains a few hundred feet in elevation, still has some charge left in the hybrid battery, then loses power, surges a couple of times, then comes to stop. The engine continues to run at idle and I get no warning or check engine lights. The "ready" light stays on. This time, the second time it happened, I turned off the car, turned it back on again immediately, and all was well. The remainder of the 1000' climb went fine. As did several other similar climbs on the same drive. Since then I've climbed this hill with a cold engine without a problem, so it's intermittent.

I hesitate to pay Toyota for a code scan since the check engine light did not come on. Should I do this anyway? My local auto parts store will scan for free, but I know that their scanner will not read Toyota-specific codes, just industry standards.

Any ideas or suggestions? Thanks in advance.

 

Correct, the engine is unresponsive to the accelerator pedal. I'm positive of this--I tried several times.

Yes, IG-OFF back to READY and the car works fine immediately and for the rest of the day. It's just like a reboot on the PC.

 

Thank you, very much. We'll talk to the dealer about it.

 

The problem has not yet happened with a warm engine. It's only happened twice, both times cold, and I've made that climb many more similar climbs with a warm engine with no problem at all.