$6,000 repair - are you kidding me?

Methinks Rhonda was just very unfortunate in many respects. Some people buy a Prius of similar "vintage" as hers and have literally nothing major go wrong with it at all - even up to 250,000 miles.

Though unfortunate in this respect - and we DO empathise with her situation, the truth is that this is one of those relatively rare occurrences that happen to Prius owners. Judging not only by the Prius Chat Forum, but also by reviews from literally all over the world, I'd say the Prius Gen II is very reliable indeed.

By the way, a lot of HV Battery failures seem to occur in very hot climatic zones - possibly because some Prius owners do not realise that in those conditions it is prudent, vital even, that the HVAC (climate control?) is always running when the Hybrid is in use. True, there's an oft quoted 2 - 3mpg penalty for this, but the A/C cools the cabin and guess where the fan that cools the battery directly sucks it's air from? Yup! The cabin. Keeping the cabin cool keeps the HV battery cooler in toasty climatic conditions and consequently prolongs it's life by a considerable margin.

Of course, this is not to say Rhonda never used the A/C. The previous owner may have precipitated this problem by not keeping the cabin cool when it really mattered - or perhaps even leaving it parked for days at a time in fiery temperatures. That's theoretically possible - not all owners might think of important details like that.

Good luck Rhonda, we all hope after this, your Prius will give you the type of sterling service we've all come to appreciate and perhaps often taken for granted.

Data


iPad ? HD

 

I'm not sure leaving AC off is going to hasten the battery's failure. Not nixing the idea, just dubious: that a modest increase in cabin air temperature would overwhelm the battery fan's cooling ability.

Toyota's engineers played it safe with the battery, only using a small range of it's actual capacity, from empty to full. I'd speculate they're attention to cooling would be similar.

With the Honda Civic Hybrid battery fiasco, Honda was saying high use of AC hastened battery deterioration.

 

Sorry to hear about having to dump a load of money into your car, especially in your situation. Lets hope you can recover some of the $ with years of dependable service.