Brake & ABS Problem, Where Do I Go From Here

Personally I'm not a Prius expert as of yet I have tons of Corollas and been with Toyota 40 years but not in Priuses before I go out and buy a whole bunch of nonsense to electrically bleed my brakes which I have not attempted yet I've changed the pads on my 09 put rotors and pads and all that nonsense on my 13 and did not have to do any brake bleeding. at least I don't remember doing any brake bleeding. And if I did all I would have done initially with the car off and the remote away from it even on my own nine would have been the crack the brake bleeder over a white paper towel and watch it drip you can see air push itself out of the brake zerk fitting it kind of bubbles and then when the air stops you have a steady drip of fluid running down the caliper hitting your paper towel you can see this clearly when that air stops I close the brake bleeder now there's no air in any of the system is much fluid that is run out if you want to run it into a container so you have an idea of how much fluid you've captured and how much air is not there by all means do that but before I start spending money I have tech stream TSI before I even hook that up and start electrically bleeding brakes I'll do that first so far my '09 is not required any bleeding operations and I've replaced the pads but not the rotors on the 09

 

My junky advance auto scanner gets abs codes from my 2013 and 09 . I also own a dealer tis system

 

To read trouble codes from the brakes, at minimum all you need is a short wire and the ability to count light blinks. You connect two pins at a connector (Tc and CG) and the dash lights blink out two-digit codes.

That gives you a bit less information than a scan tool would give you. The tool gives you five-character trouble codes. Mostly, each of those corresponds one-to-one with a two-digit blink code, but some of the blink codes cover more than one trouble code. For those, you learn more with the scan tool.

For some of the trouble codes, there will also be one or more three-digit INF codes giving additional information, and only Techstream (or some other scan tool with that capability) can show you those.

Techstream lets you call up the bleed procedure. Some other "professional"-level scan tools can do that too. More generic tools and phone apps are less likely to have that feature.

"Programming" is not commonly needed for the Prius brake ECU, and any time I need programming done, I go to the dealer. Technically, Techstream lets you reflash programming, but the quality of the dongle connecting your computer to the car is important for that, and most of us are using inexpensive ones from the internet.

When I need a reflash done, I'm happy to let the dealer use Techstream with their $500 dongle that Toyota tests and approves, and let them worry about it if anything goes wrong during programming and bricks the car.