Used Inverter?

Are you inverter-shopping because of the failure of an existing inverter?

 

LKQ inverters like 100 200 maybe in certain locales . So your paying 800 or so labour about 3 hrs gets it in more like 300 labour . Depending on market of course

 

If you put in a used inverter Toyota won't cover a subsequent failure in their 15 year unlimited mile warranty.

 

They will only warranty what is defective. Unless you want to pay them to replace more.

 

If you do that you want to get the latest inverter that will fit in your car and all the electronics will plug up to it I believe on a Gen 3 that would be 2015 somewhere around there that should have all the updates done to the inverter so that there's not much the Toyota dealer can do to that inverter because it has all the updates If you get an older one like out of a 2010 or 2012 maybe even my 2013 you may not get those updates course I don't know if that would really matter a lot I don't see why you couldn't take it to the dealer and then get it updated but you might have to pay for it because it's technically not under your warranty it might still be under Toyota's warranty but the cars in the junkyard now so that owners dead in the water as far as warranty goes so that VIN number goes bad in the database for warranty repair pretty much that simple so if you could find cars that have been kept up by decent owners those updates should have been done you know how people are today they get a letter in the mail they're lined up at the dealership with five kids and the car smoking cigarettes waiting in line

 

Remember the original inverter and all of the used inverters including 2015 have a factory defect, The software update was a bandaid for marginal semiconductors. Why spend money to put in another weak and likely to fail part?

They will replace everything that is bad and you maintain your warranty on it. Its a no brainer. In January or February you could get reimbursed for towing based on the extra coverage taking effect then.

 

So he's in warranty no question about it there's no discussion here well then obviously go get your warranty done I didn't see where it said he was in warranty I thought it was somebody thought it might be blah blah blah I'm going on the thing that is probably not or it's going to be an act of Congress to maybe get them to act inverters are so plentiful here where I am it's practically not worth it for me to drive to the Toyota dealer spend the two or three hours over there discussing nicely and being nice to people and doing all that stuff I would already have the inverter out in the other one back in almost in that amount of time and with all the late model Prii that are junked in the southeast USA and wrecked I would think getting inverters with the later updates should not be a problem especially here Southerners are real weird about taking their fancy little $30,000 cars and making sure every available warranty item has been done in triplicate if possible other places maybe not so much

 

I've yet to see evidence that there's anyone connected to this forum who knows that to be the case, or has any reason to claim to.

They'll determine which parts require replacement in your specific case and replace those, as described further in this post. They can include the IPM, the converter, the MG ECU, and/or the current sensor assembly. In some cases the whole inverter can require replacement, but often not.

 

Well I would think that most of them are out there in the wild have had this update done or a bunch of them have anyway and so as they get wrecked and show up at LKQ I'm assuming they're going to have a sticker on them or something whatever Toyota does I see in a lot of these repairs it says in the last part of the text apply the such and such and so and so sticker to the bottom or the side or wherever on the device so maybe there's a way to tell but I would also probably in rightfully so assume that the car had been campaigned at some point Toyota people are like that

 

The only update to a working inverter was software. And then they still fail.

 

No, the MG ECU. That's a single thing. A Gen 3 Prius has around a couple dozen different ECUs located different places in the car, and the MG ECU is located inside the inverter case, on a bracket above the IPM. Sometimes if the IPM fails dramatically enough, it can toast the MG ECU. (It can also blow the side out of your inverter case, in which event you get a whole shiny new one.)

The MG ECU is one of the ECUs that get firmware updated in the inverter-related recalls. (The other is the power management control ECU, which is behind the glove box).

A question about whether the firmware update was done on a used part can be answered by doing a health check in Techstream and comparing the "calibration IDs" for those ECUs with the ones specified in the recall instructions.

 

MG means motor-generator. ECU means electronic control unit. There are a couple dozen ECUs in the car, each one being a little computer that controls a certain thing.

There is an ECU that controls the engine. An ECU controlling the engine can also be called an ECM (engine control module). It's really the only one that gets a special name like that. For the rest, whatever ECU controls the such-and-such will just be called "the such-and-such ECU".

So the MG ECU is an ECU for controlling the two motor-generators that are inside the transmission. It does so by controlling the IPM just below it, which is a water-cooled brick with six honkin' transistors for each MG, and those are what deliver the power to the MGs.

IPM is sometimes glossed as "intelligent power module" or "integrated power module" depending on whom you ask, but it's really only slightly more "intelligent" than bare transistors. It's like transistors that are able to detect gross overcurrent or overheating and tell the MG ECU about it. The real smarts for making the motor-generators go is in the MG ECU, with the IPM just providing the grunt.