Help Please ☹️ Quit Again While Driving

It would be REALLY nice if this was continued at the end of your ORIGINAL thread so we wouldn't have to ask the same questions all over again.

EDIT: Wait a sec. If you posted here about your car previously, why does the system show that you have only ONE post ???

Like: How old if the 12 V battery ?
What is the voltage in ready mode (car running)?
Did anyone check the OTHER end of the main battery cables ?
Has the battery recently been fully charged with an external charger ??
Once the battery goes really low, the car will take a LONG time to fully recharge it.......if ever.

IF the battery is more than 5 years old, a new one probably would be a good idea.

 

A Gen 2 Prius charges that 12 volt battery very slowly. If it has been severely drained, plan on ten to twelve solid hours with the car in READY to let the battery charge back up. Or if you have a battery charger you can take the battery to it and recharge there, if you don't have a safe place to have the car on for twelve hours.

Even on a charger, the charger should be set for a similar slow charge rate, so you should still plan on a similar amount of time to get it charged. A faster charge rate is harder on the battery.

Being deeply discharged like that will shorten the life of the battery some, but it's often the rapid dump of new charge into it, from a jump or on a rapid charger, that really clobbers it. If you are gentle about recharging, you can often keep a battery for a good long life even with a modest number of, ahem, unplanned deep cycles. (Don't ask how I know.)

Edit: hmm, Sam and I were answering at the same time, and for once have said roughly the same thing....

 

A battery drawn so low that you have to jump the car does not always regain its former glory. You win some, you lose some.

If the battery has been severely impaired by that experience, one way that you find out is that the time to fall from 12.58 to 8 gets a lot shorter than you thought.

You're in a picture with ambiguity right now, because you were driving about with a battery that got very flat and never was well recharged afterward, and that could be responsible for some of your later driving problems. Some will suggest that the trouble code you have might just have been caused by the low battery; I am not much of an adherent of that school of thought, but if there were ever a picture where I might see that happening, this could be it.

The thing is, a real P0A93 could also cause your car to conk out while driving, so I'm not convinced it isn't real, either.

What we need to do is eliminate the ambiguity by getting a healthy, well-charged battery in there, and making sure it stays healthy and well charged, and see what happens under those conditions.

 

Ditto with the post above...

A healthy 12V battery means everything to a Prius, and I've always load test batteries after it's been fully charged off the charger for battery health before I install back into my vehicles..

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

Well, even if it was the inverter pump originally, it might at this point be the inverter pump and the battery. The battery seems to have lost several hit points from the recent draining and jumping.

About the most you can do if you want to avoid unnecessarily replacing the battery is put it in a safe well-ventilated corner with a known good, 5 amp or slower charger, let it charge all day, try it again in the car, and see if it holds its charge better.

When you get it all charged and ready to try again, as soon as the car is in READY, measure the "battery" voltage then. (The quotes are because when the car is READY, you're really measuring the voltage the car supplies to the battery.) It should be at least 13.8. If it isn't, the car isn't charging the battery, and that battery can hardly be blamed for running down if that's not happening.

 

Just FYI, depending on what type of scanning tool you used, it may throw a code that reads as the inverter pump when in actuality it is the hybrid battery that is going out. You need a OBDII scanner that can read hybrid/electric systems, specifically Toyota in this case.

I had my car scanned and they told me it was an inverter pump, I looked at their scanner myself. Turns out it was the hybrid battery going out. They reset the code and I was on my way again, until about 1 week later when the weather became a bit more warm, and I got stranded on the street. I had some jerky hybrid people throw in a battery, and I was again functioning, yet only for two more months. Got frustrated and paid for my own scanning tools (OBDII Bluetooth scanner compatible with Dr. Prius and Hybrid Assistant, and also bought the paid version of Dr. Prius and Torque Pro) and did a LOT of reading. A LOT.

If you've noticed performance issues (acceleration, not running smooth, etc.) then you're likely in bad territory with the 12V and hybrid battery. When I changed those two, my Prius came back to life 100%. I would start with the 12V AGM battery (dont skimp buy the Toyota TrueStart) and go from there. If there is someone in MS, they might be able to help you scan your car to get the true codes and view your hybrid pack.

Another thing to check is the water seal in the trunk area, and see if there is any water in that compartment fouling the connections. I've seen some YouTube videos where that seemed to be the culprit for others. Not likely in this case, but ya never know with the recent storm out yonder.

Good hunting!

 

In my experience, the car doesn't set an inverter coolant pump code but really means the hybrid vehicle battery and vice versa.

You may well have seen something, but misconstrued it somehow.

 

THEY test it with an external load applied to see how "healthy" the battery is.
Testing the voltage with no load doesn't tell you a lot.

 

It's not the car, it's the scanner trying to read it. Look up back at my post where I was saying to use a scanner that reads hybrid/electric vehicles.

 

I hope you meant 37 milliamps.

A parasitic draw of 37 amps would have your battery done for in an hour.

 

if you can't afford a $200. battery, and maybe an inverter pump, i would dump it before it's thousands instead of hundreds