2011 Prius Brake, VSC, ABS lights after spark plug change

Any chance you could link to the "manual" you found on here, or screenshot where the codes were "something generic" and ABS 98 wasn't the accel sensor calibration? It would be good to get a handle on where some of the unhelpful information is coming from.

 

The PriusChat community has worked pretty hard to make sure that information is easy to find. @Elektroingenieur invested the effort to put together a wiki page that explains not only how to get to the Toyota manuals directly from various parts of the world, but also a lot of resources where the same information may be available without the small Toyota subscription fee. Hardly a week goes by where I haven't linked to that page a dozen times replying on a dozen different threads.

As far as leading horses to water, it seems like this community has done about as much as the circumstances allow. There would be all sorts of cool ways for PriusChat to serve up the information if it weren't under copyright, or were Creative Commons licensed or something, but that's not the world we're in. So the baseline is making sure everybody knows, or can easily find out, where the information is, and what with the wiki page and all of the links to it, and short excerpts from the manual that do get linked into threads when the person posting feels it wouldn't stretch 'fair use' too far, I think we're doing about what we can there.

There's another part of the picture, where we know where the water is and mark the trail as clearly as possible leading to it, but people on the way to finding it are often getting waylaid by bad information. That's an area where there is still room for us to do a lot better. That's why I suggested it'd be helpful to know what source you were looking at where you found that the codes you had were "something generic" or that 98 wasn't the accel calibration. If that's a 'source' you stumbled into, it might be out there for others also to stumble into, and we could at least put some yellow caution tape around it or something. (Even if you didn't save searches, your web browser very probably has a "browsing history" feature that would let you find it again.)

The idea of a sticky list of codes and meanings is one of those things that sounds good in the abstract, but we already can see how it works in practice. There are lists that you can search up roughly everywhere, that have a bunch of codes listed with a sort of one-liner 'fortune cookie' next to each one, and it turns out those don't help people. The fortune cookies can be useful memory jogs to someone who has looked up that code in the manual before, or is going to look it up anyway, but on their own they don't convey nearly enough about what the code means, why it gets logged, or how to troubleshoot it.

That information is what's in the manual. It's hardly ever less than a page for a given code, and often several pages. The best thing you can do after reading some codes is go straight there and get the straight scoop, not find a list of fortune cookies and try to guess what they're telling you.

Time and again, the fortune cookie approach misleads people and throws off their problem solving. Either somebody will look up a code and see that the fortune cookie has the name of a part, so they go buy that part and replace it, not realizing the code was asking them to find out why the signal from that part wasn't getting somewhere. Or they'll decide the fortune cookie makes no sense to them, therefore the code must be bogus, and go off trying other things that have nothing to do with the issue.

So lists of codes with fortune cookies are things that exist (even built right in to most code readers), have existed for years, but aren't useful. It's hard to exaggerate how useful they aren't. An actual PriusChat example was somebody replacing a throttle pedal assembly (in the cabin), instead of a throttle body (on the engine), having misinterpreted a terse fortune cookie.

Now what would be useful would be a list of codes with their detection conditions and troubleshooting info as found in the manual. But that wouldn't be any sort of short sticky. It would effectively be a large fraction of the manual. Here be lawyers....

The same thing kind of goes with the procedures as for calibration. If your car has given you a code and you've looked it up in the manual, which was the most useful thing you could do, and you find out a calibration is called for, well, you're already looking in the right place and the procedure is there and you do that.

But you've already seen what happens to procedures circulating around on the net out of context; they turn into word-of-mouth "tricks" that nobody even remembers are specific steps for doing specific things, and over and over we see these posts saying "gee I even tried all the tricks!"

As with the fortune cookie business, making short out-of-context lists of good information turns it into bad information.

So that's why I don't personally feel I'd like to contribute to that. It's a big forum and somebody else might come along in five minutes and feel differently and post it. I won't mind, I'd just rather that not be me.

 

Here's an example for one of the codes you had:



The C1336 is the DTC that would show up on a code reading tool. After the slash, the 98 is the blink code.

Near the start of the brake section there are separate tables with all the ABS blink codes together, all the ECB blink codes together, all the VSC blink codes together, so you can look there first and then turn to the page for the corresponding DTC. You do have to keep track of which light blinked which code, so you look in the right table.