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GEN. II What is the average LIFESPAN of the HYBRiD battery before it dies?

Discussion in 'Gen 2 Prius Main Forum' started by ski.dive, Oct 2, 2013.

  1. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    i thought it used around 60%?
     
  2. bisco

    bisco cookie crumbler

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    i'll go with the 150,000 mile, 10 year warranty. toyota knows most are going to make it that far and not much farther.
     
  3. Simbaboy

    Simbaboy Active Member

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    I bought my 2009 with 225,000 Miles and kept aside $2,000 for a battery replacement.
    Knock on wood the $2K is still sitting in the bank.
    Now I am at almost 250,000 Miles and am loving my car even more.
    In fact, I am looking to add a much newer Prius to add to our family fleet.
    Simba

    Getting ready for a 6,000 Mile family trip. Driving from Mid-Michigan to Calgary then onto Moab (via Vegas, St. George Utah) and back to home
    [​IMG]
     
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  4. TKW_NOLA

    TKW_NOLA New Member

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    My 2009 gen 2 with relatively low mileage (44k) still ran well with ok mpg, but battery monitor started to cycle quickly between purple and green. I assumed this meant impending doom so I traded it in for a 2021 gen 4
     
  5. TKW_NOLA

    TKW_NOLA New Member

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    BTW, best car I ever owned. I never did anything in 12 years beyond new tires, new 12 volt battery and standard scheduled maintenance
     
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  6. Another

    Another Senior Member

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    New HV batteries are no longer expensive so if the car is otherwise in good shape, just replace the HV battery. Rebuilt batteries are as low as $1,000 with a three year warranty. A new car will burn through multiples of that amount in depreciation in the first month.
     
  7. Moving Right Along

    Moving Right Along Senior Member

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    Rebuilt batteries aren’t worth it. They can fail far more quickly then you’d expect. You can get a brand new battery from 2k1Toaster’s company for $1600 plus installation.

    Also, several years after the beginning of this thread, we still don’t have a definitive official answer for the average lifespan of a gen 2 Prius high voltage battery. Based on the publicly available user data I found when I bought my car in 2017, the batteries seem to be designed to last 10 years and 150,000 miles, with average reported failures occurring at 11-12 years old and 160,000 miles. But it’s also important to note that battery failures only occurred in between 2-10% of the cars I could find based on information gathered from surveys here as well as True Delta and some articles by Consumer Reports.

    Considering all gen 2 Prii are now 12+ years old and many have over 160,000 miles on them, we’re now in a spot where it’s far more about each individual car, how well it was maintained, the climate it was in, and the driving patterns used with it. All these things can affect high voltage battery lifespan, along with variations in the quality of the individual battery modules. Some Prius battery packs may last 20 years or more, and we already know of a number that have lasted several hundred thousand miles.
     
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  8. wjtracy

    wjtracy Senior Member

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    Our 2006 battery lasted about 13.5-years and 195k miles. We traded for a 2020 RAV4HV at that point.
    I have a theory that Toyota improved HV batt life by about 2008/2009 model year, but of course Toyota is not disclosing any information about batt life, so it's just a hunch based on reports here.

    Gen2 batt life has always been thought to be a function of Age + Miles. Also Gen2 has the control system allows driver to completely drain the HV battery after EMPTY on fuel, so that caused some batt deaths that otherwise would not have happened. Also they say heat is bad, but I do not know, my batt died in the winter....thought it would die in summer.

    I don't see too many Gen2 on the road these days. I think Gen2 are great for about 14 years and then too many big ticket item$$, unless you are good at DIY.. I would have to guess many 2006 model year have had bad batts by now.
     
  9. drone13

    drone13 Active Member

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    I don't think we can ever see an accurate average life expectancy of hybrid batteries. Just data that doesn't reflect real world experience. So you could poll 200 people and generate an average, but that really doesn't mean much IRL. There are way too many variables like, how much time has the car spent just sitting and not being driven, typical miles/week, average temps for the the users locale, driving habits including terrain like mountains or flat land, condition of components like cooling fan clogging. Just too many things that can positively or negatively affect the HV pack.

    Poll data is interesting, I just don't think it will reflect individual use cases enough to draw conclusions on how long an HV pack will last.
     
  10. dolj

    dolj Senior Member

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    I believe the OP is still driving that same Prius with the original battery some eight years later.
     
  11. ski.dive

    ski.dive Active Member

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    I'm the OP and yes....I'm still driving that same Prius with the original battery since 2008
     
  12. wjtracy

    wjtracy Senior Member

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    Our past polls here were helpful but certainly not large enough sample size.
    We always found the reported batt failure here on PC exceeded the Consumer Reports/Toyota numbers when we had some info from Toyota. That could make sense just because people are participating here for the reason of bad batts. @uart tried to take the bias out of our data and it was still a higher % failure here.
     
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  13. ChapmanF

    ChapmanF Senior Member

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    Another part of it is probably that you can do the math and compute the mean/average for any old jumble of numbers, but when you say 'average' to people, they'll most often picture a distribution that's kind of symmetrical, like the bell curve that everyone has seen.

    The distribution for Prius battery lifetimes is surely skewed; you're very unlikely to need to replace the battery years ahead of schedule, but plenty of them are still rolling along years later than expected.

    There's got to be enough data available now for somebody to put together a report that could describe the real distribution with more details than just its mean ... and that would be a lot more useful to people used to thinking about different distributions, though it might strike others as just so much gobbledygook.

    [​IMG]
     
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  14. deandt

    deandt New Member

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  15. qmanqman

    qmanqman Active Member

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    If anyone is doing average calculations and looking for data, the OE hybrid battery in my daughter's 2007 is at 292,000 miles and going strong even though it has never been reconditioned.
     
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  16. Moving Right Along

    Moving Right Along Senior Member

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    From a Youtube video I saw, the #1 cause of 2nd gen battery failure is debris getting in the fan. So if you have a clean battery fan, you’re probably going to have a long lasting battery.
     
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  17. Hanging on with 286k

    Hanging on with 286k Junior Member

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    My 2007 has the original HV battery and 300,200 miles. I change the cabin air filter 1-2 times per year since reading about its efffect on the HV battery 5 years ago.
     
  18. wjtracy

    wjtracy Senior Member

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    Are you confusing cabin air filter for battery filter? Gen2 has no filter for the HV battery intake in the back seat. Our 2006 batt died at 195k miles and 14 about years. I always felt that Toyota may have improved batt life after 2006 or so, but we do not really have any data, so it is anybody's guess.
     
  19. Hanging on with 286k

    Hanging on with 286k Junior Member

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    Hello. The cabin air filter keeps the HV battery happy.
     
  20. avocadoman1

    avocadoman1 Member

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    I had an ‘09 with 145k
    The mpg’s declined over a couple of years, and I had a difficult time staying above 42, the same way driven when new I was consistently at 48.
    The MFD display showed a battery always trying to get fully charged, but wouldn’t remain very long, consistently in the lower range, thus engine always running.

    Had an ‘06 and got the Christmas Tree lights at 125k. Toyota replaced traction battery under warranty. That unit is still running strong with 260k, consistently gets 46-48mpg.

    I traded in the ‘09 for a ‘22 Limited in Jan-‘23 (6wks ago). Got a great price, $2k under sticker, so $33,800 cash.
    This ‘22 Limited consistently gets 56-58mpg (I keep it in ECO mode).
    Not a Prime, a standard Hybrid.
    Very happy with the vehicle (other than it sits way way too low. Gonna purchase the 1-1/2” lift kit)
     
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