2005 Prius DEAD in the middle of the road

Today my wife called me in a panic. Our 2005 Prius had died literally in the middle of a T intersection at 5pm. 25mph traffic, small town, 10-20 cars/hour or so. Half hour later sheriff showed up, we tried to call tow trucks all over the area and no one wanted to come out. We finally got a wrecker who works with AAA to come from 35 miles away with a wheel lift after 2 hours of calling. Even the sheriff couldn't locate a towing company willing to come out. We have about 5 towing companies that are closer than the one that eventually showed up. Couldn't figure out anything that was wrong, thought maybe 12V battery went bad so jumped that. Nothing worked. Eventually, city showed up with cones, sheriff left, the wrecker showed up, paid him $120 to tow the car 1 mile to my home. The car got home at 8pm.

The day before, we'd been in a small city 30 miles away, and on the way there, the car showed the red triangle and hybrid system failure. I stopped at the auto parts store and it threw the inverter cooling pump codes, along with a few other codes that are related to the pump failing.

The symptoms that I had was as following: The power button would turn orange, the rectangles around the shift letters showed up but nothing else, the car would come on for maybe 1 second before shutting down again, and the main screen would come on briefly if it was put into accessory.

After 1.5 hours of research I figured out that the AM2 fuse was blown, which was connected to the said inverter cooling pump. Before this, I had disconnected the inverter cooling pump. I replaced the AM2 fuse and the car powered up normally again and started fine.

So.... I'll be replacing the inverter cooling pump this next week and it should all be fine again. I'd ordered the inverter cooling pump last night.... so it was good to figure out that today's problems were all related to the failing pump and the blown fuse.

As an aside, there is a connector next to the strut tower that comes out of the wiring loom and goes right back into it that can be disconnected to remove power from the cooling pump in order to get the car home. To get my car started after replacing the AM2 fuse I disconnected the connector at the actual pump itself but the one coming out of the strut tower is much easier to access.

That link can be found here:

Inverter Pump

I thought I'd post this in the hopes that it might save someone else from a pile of trouble related to this stupid pump.

 

yep it's real simple to fix this.

that's exactly what I did. takes 3-5 extra minutes to remove the headlight

I just bought the cheapest toyota branded pump I could find on ebay.

super simple especially if you take 5 more minutes to remove the left headlight.