06 Prius Brake light, ABS light (!) thrown after -5 temps HELP!

Get an OBD2 reader with a good rating on this list:

Hybrid battery diagnostic and repair tool for Toyota and Lexus

Dr. Prius or Torque Pro (with the extra Prius codes loaded) may be able to read your code.

And/or get a miniVCI cable and install one of the hacked virtual machine images of Techstream on a laptop (usually Windows). It is also possible to pay for a day or two of Toyota support which includes a Techstream license, but I don't know if that will work with the miniVCI cable. (Toyota suggests different and very expensive interface devices.)

The garage fridges may have all succumbed to the same power spike, perhaps from a lightning strike. Refrigerators do not work correctly at low temperatures, but that usually just means that they won't run at say 40F, and the freezer compartment melts.

 

Once the weather is more reasonable, disconnect the 12v battery for a few minutes and let us know how long it takes for ABS and brake light to come back, if at all.

 

But you don't mention that your brakes were doing anything strange so I wouldn't worry about it until the temperature comes up a little bit You obviously live in this place It's not happened before or maybe it has and it stops as soon as the temperature comes up You don't mention that you stepped on the brake and it felt real hard and you had to press extra hard to stop in the same amount of time that you normally would.?! So I'm going to guess everything is seemingly a okay and you're driving just wonderfully so it's kind of out of sight and out of mind except the lights are in your face I'm driving a car that the lights have been on for years pretty uneventful so there's always that I'm not in the cold and I do have a bad break actuator and do not want to spend $1,400 for a new one.

 

Most aftermarket scantools are not capable of "talking" to most of the systems on a Gen2 Prius.

Here's a thread that reviews several apps and devices that turn a smartphone into a scantool. Some like Dr Prius, Torque, or Car Scanner are handy but very limited.

Some are capable of scanning all systems for codes, data, and more.

https://priuschat.com/index.php?posts/3290690

ChapmanF might chime in with a link to a method to read "flash codes" from the brake system warning lights.

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

Okay, okay, I'll chime in. Am I really the only one around here who remembers we have a wiki page about that?

Blink (a/k/a Flash) Codes – How to. | PriusChat

That's how you can find out what your brake trouble codes are even if you don't have a scan tool that shows them.

My recommendation: do not blindly clear the codes to see how long they take to come back. That's what the air crew were doing with the pressure codes on that plane that blew the door off last week. Find out what your codes are first. Then clear them, if that's what you wanna do.

The idea that "everything is seemingly a okay" just because you can't already feel what a warning code is telling you about would make the whole idea of warnings a whole lot less useful. They'd be like weather ropes.

 

No, you're not the only one. I mostly use the PriusChat app on my android phone, and cannot find the Wiki from it. So I don't link it

Even with a standard internet browser, the wiki isn't obvious from the site homepage (it's on the dropdown "menu" tab).

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

I put links to it here often enough that if I open a new Firefox tab and type b in the address bar, it's the first autocomplete suggestion.

I used to have to type bli.

 

In this car generally speaking your brake actuator is failing You will not lose all breaking I've been driving a car like this now one for a year and this other one that just started this now for a few months No problems the lights are on oh well. When I get it fixed like my other one all the lights will be off and everything will be back to working fine I'm just trying to avoid the $1,400 for the part so I can wait a little bit till I find one on a junk car.

 

"The lights are on" means you've narrowed the problem down to one of a couple hundred things. That's what the trouble codes are for, and that's about how many of them there are.

So in gambling on how safe it is for you to drive your car around that way, or how safe it is for somebody else to drive their car around that way, a lot rides on whether the trouble codes they haven't read in their car are the same ones you have or haven't read in your car.

It is a good move to go to a shop and get a diagnosis, but it bears repeating that even without going to a shop, and even without having a fancy scan tool, the trouble codes can already be read, just by doing this: Blink (a/k/a Flash) Codes – How to. | PriusChat

 

But it seems like so far from what I can tell I'm not going to lose brakes I will have some sort of breaking even if the power goes out it looks like I don't think I'm going to get to find that out because the car has power and runs great other than the break actuator and it's hulabaloo of issues. So it looks like Toyota or Toyota's brake people or whatever did it bang up job of making sure that any idiot is going to be able to stop this car especially if they're realizing anything about what's going on in the world around them shouldn't be an issue. I could see a total spaz winding up in the middle of an intersection shrugging your shoulders and smiling but other than that not so much.

 

You can read counterexamples here on PriusChat, and in NHTSA incident reports.

Yes, they did their best. Of course they'd do their best. Doing their best partly means making sure the car will tell you when attention is needed.

 

Well with four sockets two wrenches a ratchet handle and that's it this is only about a two and a half hour job to change the part for most people that aren't really up on this stuff The first time I did it was an easy job was ridiculous other than the fact I had to be there turning the wrenches stupid easy. The part from the dealership is $1,740 if you walk in and order it You can get it down to about 1280 $1,300 if you call and do it all online and pick it up at the store and stay out of the parts guy's face just looking at him cost you $500 or such nonsense so there's always that. At my age now I could get a local kid to do it pay him and instruct them or watch him while he does it if that's a thing because I'm getting old. But other than that silly easy job like changing a tire really or putting the front brakes on Not much to it You can't really mess it up what might hold you up is getting the brakes bled but you'll get them good enough to drive to a shop that has the computer to bleed the brakes which should only cost about $80 it's like a 30 minute job anybody who's telling you and turning this into days worth of work is full of poop.

 

Still four sockets, two wrenches, a ratchet handle, two and a half hours, and several hundred dollars that you might avoid if you take a moment first to get the trouble codes and it turns out they're telling you something else.

 

I'm not suggesting not getting the trouble codes I'm just saying before you spend $2,600 maybe give it some thought of course if you fly a desk and live on a telephone maybe rethink that but my daughter can do it will she who knows It's already done for her. I would never tell somebody not to get the codes blink codes some kind of something from the car it's trying to talk to you might as well listen as if it were EF hutton you know.

 

Yes see that's the first thing everybody says I did all my work on my cars before but this hybrid blah blah blah don't let that get to you this is a Yaris basically with a funky transmission and a battery in the back and there's always that The changing of this brake business is a straightforward bunch of nothingness The bleeding process can make some squirm I've bled all of mine just like you do a regular car and then I got the Toyota software and was able to operate the valve sitting in the seat didn't seem to make much difference with the generation 2 bleeding and installing the part pre-primed and removing the part without letting all the fluid out of everywhere you use some small c clamps just some small bit of thinking and this is like working on your Chevelle SS so there's always that The hybrid doesn't really make a whole lot of difference until you start talking about the electric motors and the generator mating it up to an engine all of that sort of thing The brake device you are changing is similar to what BMWs and Porsches and high-end cars have used since the early '80s and those things cost $5 and $6,000 in those early days when they broke now you get that same kind of business for $1,400 brand new from the Toyota dealer and the newer cars it's even cheaper You can get remanufactured units at mount on the firewall all the brake lines go to it and everything 160 bucks I think that's like 2016 and up Corolla and what have you