Looking for a Highlander Hybrid Forum

Keep us( or at least me updated) I've always loved the RX400h. I have thought I'd buy one, but it doesn't make sense for me with its MPG compared to my Prius v. I've heard they are fantastic cars, with lots of power, and good reliability

 

Those are great, you should have no problems with one like that. I've since added a Prolong charge/discharge setup and use it during winter so that has really helped my MPG too. I would probably just do that unless the battery already has issues when you buy it. Car runs and drives like new and we have 300k kms on it now. Besides the battery I just had to change wheel bearings and brakes but that's about it. Still getting around 8-9 l/100km around town.

 

The car runs great, has a few scratches on it, not bad though. Only had oil changes done in it's lifetime so there's some deferred maintenance to do.

A friend of mine is getting rid of it, took it to Carmax and they offered them $2500. So I told them I would pay them for it, as I wanted to Toy with a bigger hybrid.

I can probably build my own charger and use a light bulb discharger for it. I just have to modify my Prius fan to use in the Lexus. I don't want to cut any of the Lexus wires.

 

Man, great price on that, definitely worth picking up.

The battery has 3 fans in there, not just one to control, but would be curious if you end up building your own charger for it.

 

3 fans? well that would take some research. Cooling is pretty important and I have no intention of lifting that battery out of the car.

Building the charger would be fairly easily, just like the Prius, but with more power. Not as safe as the Prolong systems (exposed wires), but only a fraction of the price.

 

Seem like you could just buy the HA fan harness for around $180 and then build the charger yourself and hook it up, should work if you wanted to skip the research part.

You can see the fans in this pic here:

 

What I did on the Prius is find an OEM fan harness from a wreck, hooked it up to 12v power and used it to plug into the fan. That was like $5

I think the newer versions require something special to power it (2010+). I haven't messed with the newer Prius yet and I'm pretty sure the Lexus will probably be similar.

I like the Prolong stuff, just bought an auto discharger from them. Great stuff.

 

Nice, I'd love to pick one of those up from them too, seems alot easier than doing the discharges manually.

 

There's a lot less downtime with the auto discharger. When I was doing the bulbs, it took me double the time. I'm thinking the auto discharger is higher current than what I do with the bulbs. I can do a discharge from 220v to 134v in about 4 hours. The bulbs would take double that time, easily.

If I had only 1 car to maintain, I would not have bought the auto discharger. But I've been doing quite a few packs recently and the bulbs just wore me out.

 

The picture of the 3 fans, I think they are all interconnected. One harness plug should be able to power all of them.

That battery pack looks very robust.....I would hate to work on it. lol

 

Not sure but there are 3 separate controllers on the Prolong setup if that helps.

2006 - 2013 Toyota Highlander Hybrid Installation Instructions – Hybrid Automotive

 

My new 2006 HiHy has 149k miles (aka 239k km) on it. I was a Prius driver for several years and I never once felt concern over the health of my traction battery.

Initially I was considering getting a reconditioned battery. Not an exhaustive search, but here's a quick top 3 list of what I found:

Hybrid Restoration Memphis : $1,800 (includes core charge) w/ 18 month warranty
Dorman OE Solutions : $4,226.99 (includes $936 core charge) w/ 36 month warranty
Green Tec Auto : $3,552.50 (includes $500 core charge) w/ 18 month warranty
Brand New OEM : $5,422.03 (includes core charge)

And searching eBay there are a number of batteries pulled from wrecks in the sub $1000 range with mileage typically between 1k to 2k miles on them.

That raises a couple of questions for me.

Do we have any good figures on what the life expectancy of the traction battery actually is?
Is there a good way to evaluate the current health of the traction battery?
Are there any symptoms that might reveal a traction battery on the brink of failure?

Maybe I'm planning the funeral a little too early.

 

Looks like your car was traded in before the 150k miles warranty ran out.

The prices for NEW batteries on the HiHY and RX400h are really expensive. So reconditioning it is a no brainer with a prolong system or something similar before it fails. Retail price $4847.66

 

Biggest problem with those pre-2008 HiHy's is the inverter going out on them (often at the least opportune time) so having an extra one of those on hand would be handy (can always sell it later if not used). As far as the traction battery with 150k as long as you have a mini VCI setup I would check the stats on the battery pack. If all looks good just invest in the Prolong charge/discharge setup and you should be fine. I would only do the Prolong cycling in winter when temps are lowest so you minimize any negative effects on battery life. Install can obviously be done during the summer though.

 

wouldn't the fan be able to cool the battery enough during charging cycles? even during summer months?

 

I don't know how much heat is really generated in the process but there's a reason why the batteries from up north last alot longer in use so to me keeping it as cool as possible when topping up the cells is a good thing. Perhaps it's overly cautious, but I always tend to err on the conservative side. I did note the top up voltage went a fair bit higher on mine in -20 weather than it did at around freezing, I hit almost 257V (max is 260V on PS) when it finally stopped climbing in those frigid temps.

 

Yeah I don't know the specifics on these modules. I normally split up my charges on a grid charger, I don't go 24+ hours at 1 time, I normally split it into 2 cycles of 12+ hours. I haven't had any issues yet, so I'm just keeping it like that.

 

Just checked the price of a new inverter for HiHY is $8000+ Holy crap

 

Yep, both the battery and the inverter sucks to get stuck buying from the dealer so best to have a boneyard one on hand if you have higher mileage (2008 got a revised version but I don't believe they are interchangeable). Now there should be a recall on these so check your records to see if it has been performed already and if not it's worth taking it in to have it serviced.

 

Please understand I am just curious, given the substantial kWh of the pack, have you considered a plug-in lite mod?

We only have plug-in Prius and BMW i3-REx today so I do not have resources to test my hypothesis.

Bob Wilson