pre-owned vehicle service history - concern

Good catch. Find another car.

 

Pass.

 

Run; just don't walk away!

 

Oh well. Hopefully, Toyota's systems are all well-designed to put up those errors and go into limp mode well before any long-term damage is done.

And even if there is any long term damage, it can often be pretty insignificant. I once worked somewhere and we told manufacturing to build the electronics but not turn them on, because the cooling system was not yet finalized (or sufficient). Well, they apparently missed that direction, so I ended up spending some time figuring out exactly how much the electronics overheated by, and passed that information along to our reliability engineer. He crunched some numbers, and estimated that it only took like 2 weeks out of the total lifetime of the electronics - which, considering we expected it to probably last for 5-10 years, is basically nothing. Your car is designed to last even longer than that, and actually has some thermal protection systems built-in.

 

The rule of thumb is for every 10C rise in Tj the relative life of the semiconductor is cut in half. The inverter normally operates around 88C when it is happy and working under normal conditions. The Prius will throw a code and say the car is doomed when the temperature rises above 111C. If the car was perfectly fine and then bam all the coolant leaked out and the temp rose to 111C for an hour (not probable, but just an example) then instead of taking 1 hour of life off of the inverter you took 4.6hours off of the life of the inverter in that 1 hour of real time. In a car that will run for decades, this is nothing. If this was something that the owner knew about and taped over the warning light to not be bothered and drove on it for a year, that could be a serious consequence of 4 and a half years cut off the life of the car. Doubtful that happened in the 10K miles before they brought it in.

 

It said the reservoir was empty. Not that the system was empty

Considering it has an 8 yr 100K warranty, it's not really something to worry about at this point.
Just make sure and trade it back to the dealer before the warranty expires

 

Probably no big deal if the car was not driven with no coolant at all for a long distance. even less of a worry if it was cool weather conditions at the time. With 19,000 miles you should still have warranty?

 

That's best.Just enjoy it.

 

I'd be very concerned about the technician's spelling.

 

Well spotted!