2002 Prius 91,000 miles .....won’t start and will only continue running connected to a jump box

possible inverter fried. have auto parts store run a free scan. sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
you can also get cheap phone apps

 

Make sure inverter cooling pump is functioning. Check for fluid flow in reservior.

 

Toyota will tell you that you need one of their pricey replacement batteries. You will eventually need a battery that's proper for your car.

You have lots of issues here, blown & replaced fuses (are you sure you got them all?) Battery drain, probably a problem with the inverter or the MC coil (charges and drives the car,) & maybe an inverter coolant pump & coolant level.

The car won't run long enough to drive someplace for service by an experience Toyota hybrid shop, right? I would be more likely to take it to an indie shop than a dealer, btw. Google for your area. Imho, if you don't have the money to get it properly diagnosed, you probably don't have the means to repair it. This could be serious and seriously spendy to fix. A miniVCI and Techstream would probably help. A bluetooth dongle and a Torque Pro app probably wouldn't.

 

A simple voltage test on the new battery before it is installed AND after installation with the car "running" needs to be done.
Sounds to me like these new batteries come from the factory DEAD and need to be manually charged the first time.
That is a fairly common occurrence........but the seller usually knows that.

 

If you really can't afford $100 or so to have a dealership hook up with techstream, see what's actually going on, I'd sell it.

 

The inverter is the big aluminum box on the driver's side of the engine compartment. I'm sympathetic, but without a techstream scan, you won't possibly know what's malfunctioning. You can buy a MiniVCI cable at Amazon or on Ebay, they come with software (pirated by those paragons, the Chinese) and are easiest installed on an old XP laptop--which are dirt cheap. Less than 100 bucks would get you set up.

 

Not true at all.
You should be able to get a reasonably good idea of what it wrong with a $10 multimeter.

As for the battery they sold him, it is WAY overkill as there is no reason for a "deep cycle" battery in any normal car application and certainly not a Prius that gets normal use.

Goodyear has your money now. It should be up to them to get a working battery into your car.
And they can do a simple charging test to see if the inverter is working too.

 

That means they didn't want to work on it. A normal diagnostic charge should be about one hour of labor, which is around $120 at most dealerships.

If that battery 100% matches the battery that is in your car... THEY SOLD YOU A SIX VOLT BATTERY, WHICH IS WRONG. The Prius aux battery is a 12 volt, just like every car on the road since 1968. The comment in your earlier post about "the battery was only putting out six volts" also points to this.

Your picture is the same one that CarQuest shows for a G110-12 battery on their site. According to an older PDF from CarQuest ( Wayback Machine ), that is a 6 volt battery. If you have the actual part number from the sticker on the top of the battery, you can check it against that PDF to be sure.

That battery might work for your Prius if you use two of them in series, but just one won't work very well at all.

I hope this helps!

 

Wow good catch... How can you put a 6v battery in the car?!?!?

I was going to chime in with sounds like the inverter was fried with the reverse jump long ago. But a 6v battery isn't doing any good.

 

Is the inverter even operating? If not, any fresh 12V battery will die fairly quickly for lack of charging.

When the car is "running", the 12V system voltage must be at least 13.5V. If it is under 13V, or anything less than what the new battery read before installation, then the inverter is not properly charging the 12V.

 

[rant]The 19-year-old droid at Goodyear put "2002 Toyota Prius" into the computer, it spit back that battery, droid asked the boss to get one delivered from CarQuest or Advance Auto, it was duly delivered, and the droid bolted it in. The droid might have spent one or two seconds wondering why the battery was so tiny, or why the stock Prius cables didn't fit, but then remembered that droids are paid to get the car out of the bay, not to think.

I think there's about a 30% chance that there was a footnote or "click for more information" link on the computer screen that told the droid that two of those batteries were required, but either nobody read it, or somebody read it and thought "naw, that can't be right".

In a slight defense of the droid, the youngest you can currently be to have driven a new vehicle off of the dealership lot, which came from the factory with a 6-volt battery, is about 67 years old. (Obviously, you could be a little bit younger than that and still have driven a 6-volt used car, but it's not exactly common.) The droid might not even be aware that six-volt batteries exist.

One of the highly trained technicians at the local Goodyear shop tightened the lug nuts so hard on my '01 after a flat fix that I broke an honest-to-Kiichiro, made-in-the-USA, SNAP-ON socket trying to get them loose again. They thought I was full of stuff when I brought the car back. I watched one of their techs walk up to my car with about a 1 foot breaker bar, reach down with one hand, and casually try to loosen the nuts... and then look surprised as hell when they absolutely failed to budge. The service writer was more apologetic after he watched that tech jumping up and down on the end of an 18" breaker bar to get the nuts loose.[/rant]

 

If it turns out that Goodyear really did sell you a 6 volt battery, and you need to get a proper 12 volt one, there are some options.

If Goodyear's application note for that battery says they are supposed to use two of them, you might be able to get them to install a second one to bring you up to 12 volts. If the batteries are physically small enough, they might be able to get two of them to fit in the standard Prius battery bracket. They still have to think about how they connect up the positive and negative cables, though.

That CarQuest battery is probably made by a company called East Penn Manufacturing, in Pennsylvania. They also make "Deka" brand car batteries, and a lot of the "store brand" batteries for car parts stores, farm supply stores, and places like that. East Penn should have some kind of help line that either Goodyear or CarQuest can call to get advice on what battery should fit your car. (East Penn might not tell you this if you call, but they will tell a mechanic or parts-store employee. Unfair, but true.)

The original 12 volt battery that came with the 2001-2003 Prius from the factory turned out to be a size that was fairly uncommon in the US. I think some years of Mazda Miata came with a battery that was the same physical size, but the positive and negative posts were the opposite way around than they are in a Prius. For the negative post, this wasn't such a disaster... you could replace the stock Prius negative cable with a "generic" one from the car parts store that was slightly longer, and it would reach. For the positive post, it was more interesting - you've probably seen the small fuse box that hangs off of the positive terminal of the stock battery. Somehow you need to keep that fuse box and connect to the positive post on the new battery. It would have been possible to use another "generic" battery cable on the positive terminal to reach the fuse box, but then you'd also need to mount the fuse box somehow so it couldn't flop around and short out. I think some Prius owners actually did this in the early to mid 2000s, but I don't know the details.

As far as I know, Toyota either never sold the factory-size battery as a replacement part, or only sold it for the first few years the Prius was available. Starting sometime towards the late 00s, Toyota's official fix was a kit that had a new, bigger, bracket for the bottom of the battery to sit in, a new, taller metal bracket to go over the top of the battery, a new negative cable, and a new positive terminal clamp. Once you installed that stuff, you could then install the bigger battery that Toyota also sold. I put this kit in my '01 when the original 12 volt battery quit in 2011. I believe Toyota still has this parts kit and bigger battery available at the dealership, but just the battery runs about $220-ish, and the parts kit is another $30-40.

(The reason this parts kit had a new negative cable and a new positive terminal clamp is that the original Prius battery had very small terminal posts - some mechanics call them "pencil posts". Most of the replacement batteries have the thicker posts that are common on most other Japanese, US, and European cars. So if you install a replacement, you need the bigger-diameter clamps to fit over the bigger-diameter terminals.)

There is a line of batteries called "Optima" that are made a little differently than traditional car batteries. They are more expensive, but are supposed to last longer. They make one in a size that will fit in the same hole as the original '01-'03 Prius battery, and there is a Web site that will sell you an Optima battery and the battery cables you need to make it work in a Prius. One possible drawback here is that Optima batteries used to be made in the USA, and the user feedback on them was often "the battery will outlast the car". Around 2010-ish, Optima production was moved to Mexico, and user feedback from some of the classic-car, hot-rod, and fancy-boat people was that their quality took a dive at around that time. I've never run an Optima so I can't personally comment... as they say, your mileage may vary.

My '01 came from the factory with the small Toyota battery, and it lasted until 2011. In 2011, I replaced it with the parts kit and bigger battery from the Toyota parts department. Around late 2017, that bigger Toyota battery started going out, and in spring 2018, I replaced it with an Odyssey brand battery, which are made by Enersys (formerly Hawker, formerly Gates) in a factory in Missouri about an hour from my house. I felt like replacing it with another Toyota battery was not a good value, as Toyota wanted the above $220-ish for it. Odyssey is a similar battery to, and competitor of, Optima. The kink here is that the Odyssey battery is not the same shape as either of the Toyota batteries (it's smaller), so it was up to me to make up some shims to make the Odyssey fit in the Toyota battery bracket, and to make the Toyota battery cables fit the Odyssey terminals. So far, in about 6 months and about 2,500 miles, it's been working OK, but ask me again in 5 or 10 years.

Another kink is that since the battery is in the trunk, if it's a flooded battery (it has liquid electrolyte sloshing around in it), it "should" have a vent tube that goes from the top of the battery, through the floor of the trunk, to the outside. This is because under some charging conditions, some of the electrolyte can come out of the top of the battery, and it is considered bad to let it drip down inside the rear fender. The factory battery, and Toyota's bigger replacement battery, had this vent tube. An Optima battery, and similar batteries from other manufacturers, may not strictly need this vent tube... in those batteries, the electrolyte is absorbed into fiberglass sheets in between the lead plates inside the battery, so the electrolyte is much less likely to ever come out of the battery. (I am not running a vent tube on the Odyssey battery.) Not every flooded battery you can get has the connection on the top of it for the vent tube. Some people are OK with running a flooded battery without the vent tube; the charging system in a Prius "should" be a lot nicer on the 12 volt battery than the charging system in a non-hybrid car, so they feel that the chance of a flooded battery ever leaking electrolyte is fairly low.

I don't get money or other consideration from any companies mentioned.

 

If I could give you two "likes" on this I would. NICE CATCH!! Wow, I'm impressed! It's a golf cart battery!

 

Just a note to an old 'aux battery thread'..
I saw on PC that someone used a lawnmower battery instead of a 'correct' battery and it worked well for about a year or so. I did the same and you can find that battery for $30 counting core charge at WallyWorld. you can just use the bolts that clamp the original connector to bolt it to the battery (looks odd but works fine) In around a year, the battery may start getting weak depending on how fresh it was when bought. The display screen will start going blank and the car will shut down but a new lawnmower battery will bring it back to life. BTW there is never enough of a hard charge applied to the battery to make it recreate a lot of gas and the trunk has enough ventilation to dissipate whatever is generated. I've been running these lawnmower batteries for about 4-5 years no problem.

 

The health hazard from un-vented batteries is not merely from flammable or explosive hydrogen, but also from sulfuric acid mist. And when things really go wrong, hydrogen sulfide fumes can kill the occupants, as happened in a case three years ago:

Cayenne Poss. Hydrogen Sulfide from wrong 12v Battery | PriusChat

In a pinch, yeh, it works, electrically. But for health reasons, take it out and do it right as soon as practical.