Burnt plastic smell coming in from cabin and

I had a burnt smell coming into my cabin, but that dissipated after a few trips. It was strong though, and like you I read up on things here and the possibility of the battery hose causing the issue. For me, it turned out to be the inverter pump. I suggest you do a search on here and see if your inverter pump is working or not. It's easy to check.

 

Aloe is correct. A common source of an acrid plastic/rubber burning smell is the inverter cooling water pump failing. It's worth looking into. The bottom of the pump case has a soft rubberish potting material that gets hot and starts melting/burning when the pump fails electrically. AT some point, it eventually pops the AM2 fuse, and the car will just shut off, essentially completely dead, even if driving. This pump is located directly behind the driver side headlight. It has an electrical plug on the pump body, but an also be disconnected using the 'one wire plug' located just above and to the passenger side of the under hood fuse box. The car can be driven with this pump disconnected but should be limited to lower speeds since there won't be cooling flow through that system and the inverter will code out if it gets too warm. I've driven a 2008 about 20+ miles at 45mph with a failed pump, but it shouldn't be your first choice.

Whenever I buy a 'new to me' Gen2, that pump is on my list of things to replace asap.

 

Plastic shopping bags melted onto the cat, muffler, or even the brakes can be very stinky. The time it happened to me it smelled like melted paraffin, and it took almost a month for it to fully burn off. Anyway, if this is the problem underneath the car you will find a thing black mess on some chunk of metal that gets very hot.

10K miles between oil changes might be OK, but only if they were using synthetic oil. At that mileage it probably burns some oil. As long as they kept adding oil, which might not have made it into the service notes, no serious damage should result. But the oil would have been very dirty.

If you think it is coming from under the hood get the car into a stinky state and then carefully sniff around under the hood. There are moving parts and hot surfaces, so I do mean carefully!

 

Yes on the invertor pump. I would only buy a OEM pump from the dealership handed over the parts counter. Remove the driver side headlight to make it easy for yourself videos on you tube.. also clean your hybrid battery fan and check the air filter of leaves\junk. Report back and we can help more.