2012 Prius V, 179k miles, today I had the motor stammer/stutter after sitting with AC on for about 5 minutes. i It has never happened before, I shut it down for several minutes, checked the oil, coolant level, and looked for any disconnected thing but all was fine. So I restarted it without the AC just to eliminate that from the equation. It ran fine again, so I headed to Advance to check the code which showed the Coolant Temp Sensor. i didn’t want to buy their brand so decided I would get an oem one tomorrow. Before I reached home it did stutter again while driving almost like it was about to die. Managed to make it home. I do remember one thing about a week ago, I was rushing to the airport late at night to pick up a friend, I drove it harder than I usually do about 80 miles an hour for about 5 minutes. I saw a red light flicker on the dash so I immediately reduced my speed and it stayed gone, never returned. The next morning checked the coolant level and all was fine. But now I am thinking that maybe this is related. I did do a coolant flush back at 80k. The only non routine repair was doing the brake actuator replacement costing nearly $3k. i realize I am at that stage where things will begin to fail on a Toyota. It is due for a new set of plugs since I did them at 80k as well. After some reading here, I am thinking that possibly the water pump should be replaced. could these 2 things be the engine stutter culprit? there is no coolant loss and the oil look like honey, no milkshake. Is the water pump a big job to do? I see that some parts houses list 2 water pumps. I guess one is for the hybrid system which is not the focus here. i will order from amazon an autel ap200 to help my diagnostics here, the ap2500e seems to jave worse reviews. Open to any suggestions on other code readers around $100 or less. Also where is the location of the Coolant Sensor? All youtube vids just show a standard gen 3. thanks in advance.
