Battery Pack Life Expectancy

There is no set answer on the HV battery life, but good maintenance on the engine and especially the inverter/transaxle is important. Unless you already got a reliable service record for it, you should register on the official Toyota owners website and plug your VIN in. It will tell you at least what Toyota Service it has had done and if there are any warranty recalls, Limited Service Campaigns, or T-SBs on your car. There are a lot of experienced owners on this site to help you once you figure out what has already been done and how to do what's left economically, especially if you do some of your own maintenance work. Videos and photo essays.
Weber State University has some good videos too if you want to invest 15-20 minutes about how the p112 transaxle works and dispel some myths.

 

I think that with batteries age is a bigger factor than mileage. I'd say start saving for a replacement pack, but don't lose sleep over it.

 

The reason they did not do the transaxle ATF is because Toyota calls it "lifetime" and therefore it's not a scheduled maintenance item for any mileage. Owners will say anywhere from 30-60,000 miles for the ATF. For the transaxle coolant, do it at same interval as engine coolant. Another good source of info for your Gen I Prius HV battery is Luscious Garage website. They have a very good blog and lots of experience with Prius batteries and many of the warranty issues I mentioned earlier.

 

The Gen II 2004-2009 doesn't have a transaxle drain pan, just a plug, so can't drop a pan and clean it. Did you replace the gasket and clean the magnet on the drain plug too? It's a good indicator of how much wear there is. As long as it's like a fine paste, not much issue, but if any larger pieces are there on the magnet or in the pan, there's a problem.

 

I had a pack that lasted 220,000 miles. I think what did it in was city driving and having the vehicle sit on the street without a lot of shade for the last 2 years. Heat is what really seems to degrade the pack, and you generate heat going up hills, or with lots of acceleration then regen (think city driving).

Most of my miles were on the interstate, at 75-80 mph, and it's pretty flat here, so I don't think I was stressing the pack a whole lot doing that until I started driving around Minneapolis in summer.

 

On this battery pack lifetime issue, does anyone here think there would be a market for a service/insurance of some type to estimate remaining lifetime? I've got something in my head that involves a custom linux/android scanner that you hook up to the ODB bus, and drive the car around for a few days (getting a sufficient number of charge/discharge cycles in), and try to estimate the amp-hour capacity (and maybe the useful life remaining) of the batteries by some analysis.

I'm trying to figure out if I could create some sort of business to do this, based on some open-source code, so you could download it and do it yourself, OR pay for a service that analyzes your battery data and sends you a new battery pack if it wears out before the service says it will.

Thoughts?

 

i just had my pack go on me a couple weeks ago (i have a 2001 with 164k on the battery) see thread "while I have the hv battery out of my gen 1" with the help of bob and others, i found it was one bad cell, i got three good ones from bob and i replaced the bad one and two other weak ones. my car is back on the road and doing well at this point. im hoping to get through winter and then spend about 1600 to 2000 on a rebuilt pack using generation 3 cells.

the only issue im having is those black vent tubes on the cells, they smell, i wish i could get new ones or soak them in something to rid of the smell.

 

You might consider getting Volume 1 of the maintenance manual because it includes the traction battery testing procedure. This also includes the codes and fault tree. Volume II covers the repair procedures. A little pricy, they are available on Ebay from time to time. Also, you might look at getting a miniVCI, the Chinese knockoff of the Techstream. At $40, this will give insights to the tools that Toyota uses. This will give you some insights as to what you'd be competing against.

There are some threads about alternative OBD scanning technologies. I now the Android folks are working hard on making scanner software to track NHW11 model Prius metrics. I don't think they are trying to make their efforts into products. Then there are the SourceForge efforts.

Bob Wilson

 

I can pull the metrics to do the volume I tests for code P3006 the ELM327 scanner I have now.

The first comment on the software download for the miniVCI is 'Be sure to disable/uninstall anti-virus software' and this does not inspire confidence in a 120MB download file. Perhaps I'm paranoid after reading Defcon presenters preview hack that takes Prius out of driver’s control, but I prefer to be able to audit code that's going to interact with the ecu controlling the throttle.

One question about the Techstream/miniVCI: How fast can it pull all the battery block voltages? It seems to take a second or two with the ELM to pull all 19 blocks along with the battery current, which is not as fast as I'd like to be able to have to capture the driving behavior that seems to trigger a P3006.

 

I don't know how fast but it is designed for service technicians.

Bob Wilson

 

Time appears to be more of a factor in battery life than miles. My 2001 Prius battery died in January 2009 at 197,000 miles. My sister-in-law's identical 2001 Prius battery died in September 2009 at 97,000 miles. The 2001-2003 models had a 100,000 ten year warranty. Beginning with the 2004 the warranty changed to 100,000 miles and eight years.

 

Just a couple notes I'd like to add. I agree that heat is a detriment to the traction battery, so one thing you can check is dirt buildup on the battery blower in the rear. Probably not an issue if you don't have at least one of the following conditions: Smoker in car, dogs that shed in car, dusty driving conditions.
Next, the nature of the traction battery is that it lasts longer when it is used regularly going through it's normal charging/discharging cycle to run the car. If your car has had a busy life, without long periods of non-use, chances are the traction battery will last more miles.

 

My 01 is still kicking on the original pack (fingers crossed). It has over 122,000 miles. It still drives great.

 

I got 286,000 miles out of my '01's battery (the distance light travels in one second, BTW). Replaced it with a brand new battery pack from Toyota with the help of Avi's Garage. Now up to 318,000 miles with no codes and still getting 47.6 mpg (average of the last 10k miles).

 

Nice.