Engine Rattles wont start...watch video evidence

The battery should be the least of your worries as you can buy a salvage battery for around $400 plus shipping, check eBay.

What you should be concerned about is the accident damage to the engine and transaxle. The rattle sound is certainly not normal.

Are you able to replace the drivetrain yourself? If yes then you could acquire a salvage drivetrain and install it. Otherwise, I'd recommend staying away from that car unless you want to acquire a money pit.

 

It will cost you $10000 before it works right. Do Not buy this car unless you will enjoy spending hundreds of hours learning about it, diagnosing screwy problems, and replacing lots of stuff.

What are you trying to accomplish here? If you want to minimize total expenses buy a used NON-salvaged Civic or Corolla or something similar. If you want to own a Prius, save your money until you can buy a NON-salvaged 2004 or later.

 

I wouldn't buy unless your REALLY handy with cars and have a shop at your disposal with all equipment to perform engine/transmission swaps and straighten frames. You may also need to purchase several salvage components.

Why are you looking to buy this?

 

I'd probably recommend looking into a toyota technical info service subscription. techinfo.toyota.com

The type of stuff your looking to fix is beyond the realm of normal repair manuals.

 

The description says front end damage, the pics show only rear end damage. What is damaged besides the rear bumper? The engine turns off probably because of a DTC. Can you check the DTCs from the engine? This is very important to understand the extent of any hidden damage. I have successfully rebuilt a salvage vehicle myself. Having been through this, I can say that it can be much more difficult then a non hybrid vehicle. The good news, is that with a good OBDII code reader, such as Autoenginuity you can read all the codes. Any good OBDII tool should give you the fault you have, since the engine starts and stalls. I would thoroughly inspect underneath the car, looking for damage to the bottom of the engine/ transmission. You need to be good at car repair in general to fix this car, and you need to be good at electronics as well. If you can do the bulk of the work yourself, then you may get a good deal, if you need to farm out the work (other then body work) stay away! The repair bills for these cars can be huge!
In fixing my car, I had one problem that stumped me. I spent a long time trying to figure it out, and finally brought the car to a dealer. After 2 weeks, they couldn't fix it! They actually figured out what was wrong, but did not figure out the correct way to fix it. It turned out that the TPS wanted to be set a little below spec, which required bending a travel stop to achieve, which I found out myself empirically.
I could only work on my car a few hours a week. It took me 11 months to complete the job. If it checks out, and you like BIG challenges it can be fun, but to save money, it may be elusive.