So This Happened Yesterday Night and it was BADDDD NEWS BEars

I had similar happen recently, my decades long faith in all things Toyota blown in an instant.
I had never had the '99 Toy RAV4 (what I drive when I absolutely need all wheel drive) fail to start, or any other Toyota I've owned for that matter. And it had just ran perfectly the day before! Not having time to mess with it, I drove into town in the Prius, hoping the snow would stop and I'd make it back up the mountain at the end of the day. I did, than I tried the 4 once more, no dice. I went to a fair bit of trouble to drag it out of the unheated outbuilding and push it into my heated shop, using my tractor.

The next day, I rolled up my sleeves, got all the tools out, and for the first time raised the hood. ALL of the spark plug wires were chewed in half, probably a pack rat. My faith in Toyota was restored.

 

Dr. Prius is a neat phone app, because of the extra information it can give you that is of special interest to preening your battery (though it should be remembered that battery preening is only one small aspect of maintaining a Prius. There's also a whole car surrounding that battery).

At the same time, as phone OBD-II apps go, it is thin in its ability to report trouble codes from the car, so it can be a good idea to just also have on your phone any of the other basic OBD-II phone apps that don't have the fancy Prius-specific battery data, but do have better coverage of basic trouble code retrieval. Those will also be more useful for scanning codes from your friends' cars. It's not hard to do so; more than one app can easily coexist on your phone, and be able to work with the same dongle to connect to the car (just not at the same time, of course).

 

On Android I also use the free version of OBD Auto Doctor to monitor engine temp, as well as monitor and optimize my RPM when mountain climbing... Which apps do you use @ChapmanF ?

 

For me, it's been several years since I was actively exploring the available phone apps, because I finally decided for my purposes it's just easier to have a beater laptop and Techstream (plus my old ScanGauge II that's on the dash and plugged in at all times).

But I know there's a fairly lively ecosystem of OBD-II apps and more and better than back when I was paying more attention.

I don't want anything I'm saying to sound down on Dr. Prius. Jack seems like a good guy and his app is a good app, and when something like the DTC decoding bug came to his attention, he pushed out a release that fixed it in like two days.

I think it would be even handier if he just added a screen where it could send the typical generic broadcast DTC query and display whatever codes come back. There's some bloat involved if you try to include a database of fortune cookies to display along with the codes, but in our experience here the fortune cookies are usually less than useful anyway, and just displaying the bare codes received would be fine. Best thing to do is look them up in the manual anyway.

If he's already got the fortune cookies built into the app for the engine and battery codes he shows now, and just gave it a way to show any other codes received without fortune cookies, that could be a pretty sensible compromise.

The ScanGauge II dedicated device (normally used for displaying your favorite 4 live-data PIDs on a little dash display) also has a button to query for codes. It just shows the bare codes too, no fortune cookies. That is convenient if you're just out driving and a warning comes on, because it's even already plugged in.

 

Seems like a reasonable request... I hope @jacktheripper sees this and replies about what he's willing to add to his app?

 

I wanted to add that I just went through this questioning Toyota myself with our 2008 Prius when shopping for a new car. We maintained our Prius fairly well, but problems sort of piled/layered up on us (A/C not staying cold, intermittent rough idle shake from misfires, coolant valve failure, MFD touch went dead, clear coat gone and various other common wear items) but the thing that bothered me the most was the oil consumption. It was unacceptable to me and I blamed Toyota and wanted to trade it in on a non-Toyota new car. Then I realized I'd do better selling private party than trade-in and I started seeing if I could fix things and had a lot of success in bringing it back to running well. I think my engine oil flush and staying off the gas pedal has reduced oil consumption. That is very satisfying and I am hoping to ditch my 14mpg truck and keep the 194k mile 2008 Prius until more hybrid and electric options become available. I still need to do a combustion gas test on my coolant to be sure my head gasket is OK and get the A/C looked at by a good shop, but it is running as smooth as can be expected. Be of luck in your diagnosis and repair.

 

The way easy repairs pile up as a car gets older is the key to what either disempowers and discourages and gets people to give up the car or gets people to realize they can fix everything themselves and still have a great car for next to nothing.

 

Will it show you at least the three-digit INF code that goes with the P3000? That would be something.

It seems unusual to me to see P3000 and not some other, more specific, code at the same time.

The P3000 is a code whose fortune cookie mentions the traction battery, so you could look at the Dr. Prius information on battery condition to possibly see more about that.

The ultimate answer to "is this scanner really showing all the codes?" is to plug in Techstream and see what it shows, but if you don't want to fuss with setting that up on a laptop, it might be easier to find out if somebody near you has it and could try to pull up more information for you.

In a quick look in a web-circulating PDF of the 2010 repair manual, it seems that whoever constructed that PDF skipped over the actual workup section for P3000 with the detection conditions for that code. So it could be worthwhile to sign into TIS (more info) for access to the complete manual that should include that section.

 

Here was a case where the P3000 code wasn't related to the battery, but the fan connector, so good idea to get more information on the code.
Toyota Prius P3000: Check This Before Replacing Your HV Battery | Torque News

 

I have a 2013 and the engine just blew, if you need parts we can work it out. I am in north Jersey, where in NY are you?

 

It’s not Toyotas fault it eats oil it’s yours. Crappy oil so bad it needs an engine flush coupled with poor oil level maintenance is a guaranteed oil eater.

 

I'd give you that if we had skimped on maintenance, we didn't. Once it started sucking down oil, sure it might get low on oil as it would catch us off guard since it consumed at different rates. Every other Toyota I have had experience with owning and working on hasn't had this oil consumption problem. So it does fall back on Toyota and their stealerships to make sure we receive the right maintenance and oil type when we go in, and not offer something that causes oil consumption as you say.

 

Or, maybe, the head gasket just failed. Do you think never happens?

 

A little bewildering how we ended up talking about head gasket failure in a thread about a car with a hybrid system warning and a P3000 code.