considering a 2007 Prius with 89k miles and aftermarket battery

Sounds like a great car... Excited for you! Do you like to work on cars and learn how to do stuff that grows your skills? If so you're looking at the right car and asking the right questions at the right forum. But if you're hands off and don't work on cars and don't have someone who has good prices who's familiar with hybrids it can get stupidly expensive real quick. You'll know if your mechanic doesn't work on hybrids if the try to tell you that the brake rotors are bad. Mechanics who don't understand hybrid systems wrongly say that.

And yes the mobile hybrid guy will be able to pull that off for you... Also when you purchase the new replacement battery you'll be able to double check that effort because you basically put your old core in the container that the new pack came in and you just have to make it have the exact same parts with no signs of aftermarket branding like a painted cover or stickers on the modules. I don't think'll they mind sharpie writing on the modules, that's pretty common in old packs that have been worked on by mechanic or DIY and never heard of someone not getting their core deposit back for sharpie writing. It's the branding and painting of parts that they don't like.

Also keep in mind because your existing battery was "refurbished" it will be good for 3 months to 3 years, which buys you enough time to consider all your options... In less than a year hopefully there will be a more modern lithium replacement pack on the market that will perform way better than a new OEM pack and will cost way less too. I currently have one of these in my '07 for final testing before production begins and the pack is better in every way.

Also if you like to work on cars, sometimes you can find used packs at the wrecking yard for as low as $50 and you can take it home and recondition/rebuild the pack very inexpensively and then you'll not only have a back up pack on the shelf ready to throw in your car the moment the existing one goes bad, but you'll also know how to fix the packs yourself so you can just swap 'em out and fix it later whenever you have a problem.

 

At a minimum, be sure to run the VIN at :Track Your Service Records with Your Toyota Owners Account

 

I get the sense you're gonna have the shop do all this work for you and they're gonna charge more than you'd pay if you'd DIY it... But on the bright side the core deposit is their problem not yours.

As for hybrid battery "testing" by a competent shop, they don't really do that because to them working on packs is working on a car that's eventually going to come back for more work on the pack. That's not how a shop with lots of overhead can operate, which is why us small time hobbyist have cornered this niche market with mobile/at home servicing. A regular shop will just replace the pack with new. So if they say the pack seems good, they mean it's good for now, not because they inspected all its most common points of failure.

 

If the shop has the Toyota Techstream software, then they should be able to provide you with Voltage & Resistance Values for each of the individual battery modules. A good start in determining potential failure.

 

Are you nuts a 2007 prius and your looking at close to $9000?

 

Do you know why they had to do whatever they did with the battery? Did it fail totally? Did one or two packs fail? Did they think that was the problem, but really it was something else?

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.