How to open hood with a dead battery?

In wintry weather, sometimes my hood gets kind of iced down, and I have to do stuff like that.

 

I'd have the car checked for evidence of an improperly repaired front end collision if the hood isn't opening, and I would never again speak to anyone who told me that you cannot open the hood to a car to access a dead 12v battery under the hood, because you need a working battery to open the hood.

That just doesn't make walking around sense.
"Somehow" I believe that this would have been talked about on this forum before now, and it's been....six years since Primes came out.

How does Toyota get the hood open?
Why does the car need to be towed to a dealership for this delicate surgery?

This car is now nearly six years old, so the only reason to take the car to the dealership would be to drop someone off who wants to buy a Toyota.
Perhaps in this case....someone that you do not like very much.
I'm thinking that Vegas has an independent mechanic that's more competent to deal with this....(to say nothing about being more HONEST!)

There's NO WAY ON EARTH I would ever drive a car that's rendered completely inoperable by a dead 12v battery....but then again....they're selling cars without spare tires these days.....

 

The 2017 latch is definitely mechanical. You can literally feel the release cable tensing up just before the hood pops open.

I would recommend someone holding the hood latch release in the "open" position in the car while you go to the front and try to lift the hood. Could be a bad release mechanism.

 

i called, they said it is mechanical, and you don't need power. gal even laughed at me

she said, 'how would you get to a dead battery if you needed power?'

 

The thing that has cheered me up the most all day today is to learn that they have somebody at that customer service line who knows the answer to a question like that, and that she knows it well enough to laugh at you.

 

Probably didn't go to their India call center.

 

if i were the o/p, i'd be too embarrassed to come back and fess up

 

Last year I decided to use my battery maintainer to do a 'rejuvenate' charge on my 12V battery. Since it runs at 16V volts the instructions specified that you had to disconnect the battery from the car. I had to stop and think at every step of the process. I'd never used the key and it's been decades since I had to manually lock or unlock a car door. When I turned the key, it was like nothing happened. There was no mechanical or audible click and I didn't know if it had worked or not. It took me a couple of tries to figure it out. It was hilarious!

 

In a Toyota assembly plant, in a parallel universe, a sign:

ANYONE CLOSING HOOD
PRIOR TO BATTERY INSTALLATION
WILL BE IMMEDIATELY FIRED

 

I popped the hood of a 2018 Prius Prime with a completely dead 12v battery. What it sounds like is that you need to lift the hood that is 'stuck' but is already unlocked.

 

You can't even charge the lithium pack if the 12v is dead.

 

I am going to add some Gen2 Prius wisdom, just because it might be relevant if things like latches didn't change much. I had a similar issue. I pulled on the lever and the usual pop of the hood was not there. I assumed because there was little to no resistance, the cable was either broken or came loose.

After hours of trying to stick things into the grill and activate the lever without avail, I stumbled into a fix. Have one person pull on the lever and keep it in the open position While it is up, have another person lift the hood. When the lever is pulled inside the car, the hood was unlatched.. When the lever returned the hood latched again. You walk out to the hood and it doesn't budge. Rediculous right?

Turns out that the cable unlatches the hood and there is a spring from that lever that activates yet another mechanism that pops the hood up slightly.... that's the satisfying pop when you open the hood (and also the resistance in the lever inside the car). When the spring is broken ( my 2007 spring snapped from years of corrosion) you don't get a pop, but you momentarily unlock the hood. The broken spring was clear as day when the hood was open.

Can the later models be the same?

 

Two or three earlier contributors were spot on with their suggestions to have someone try to lift the hood while activating the hood release under the steering wheel. My hood release lever went to full deflection without any tactile resistance but the hood didn't pop. I placed a plastic door stop under the hood front to maintain upward pressure and then activated hood release lever. A satisfying resistance felt and an even more satisfying pop up of the hood. I found that the 53510A spring was missing. Thanks for the diagram from the maintenance manual.

 

I recently got a 2019 Prius Prime. The hood release is slightly misadjusted and sometimes pulling the release lever doesn't work properly. It feels like you're not doing anything, but you are. At that point, it's a two-person sort of thing. Someone needs to be pulling up on the hood while someone else pulls on the release lever.

There's a few threads on here about that. It seems like it's a common problem. (Search "prime hood alignment"). I'm not sure anyone's really found the solution yet either.

I tried loosening the hood release bolts and adjusting the hood latch but didn't get anywhere with it. There's a support that the hood latch attaches to going down to something at the bottom of the car. Looking for that would require removing the plastic bottom cover, so maybe the next time I change the oil.

Charging the car also charges the 12V battery, but I'm not sure that would work if the accessory battery is totally dead. There's also the charging schedule to contend with.