Prius C 2012 son put diesel in

Hi Everyone

This is my first post but I have found a lot of interesting information on here.

My son accidentally put diesel into his 2012 Prius C, the good news is that he didn't drive it.

I have looked under the car and the fuel tank appears to be made of a plastic material and has no drainage plug and there is no access to the tank under the rear seat like there was in the corolla, so I am presuming from what I have read its a bladder tank. Is there some way of draining the tank and flushing it.

I have tried disconnecting the fuel hose and allowing it to dribble out and I started the car and about a quarter of a tank was expelled into the container before the car stopped and all the lights on the dash board stayed on and now its complaining about the hybrid system and nothing is coming out of the fuel hose.

So first of all can the fuel tank be emptied and flushed. I will ask about the error message after I find out about flushing the fuel.

 

Thank you all for your responses.


Flushing Fuel Tank;

I achieved this by purchasing the mini VCI cable with Techstream software version 12 point something. There are some complications involved in loading and running the Techstream software which I will cover later in this post. These are the steps I took to empty the fuel tank

1. Jack up car and put on stands. I am in my fifties now and the accumulated growth around the waste means that I can no longer squeeze under a car.
2. Disconnect the fuel at the fuel rail just next to the fuel tank
3. Place a large long plastic container under the fuel hose, in Australia the fuel comes out to the left and to start with at quite a high pressure so unless you want fuel on your hard stand make sure the container can cope with the length of stream.
4. WARNING (the only one here) Make sure before you start this process that you have a Jump Starter or a fully charged battery that you can attach to the car if the Aux battery runs down. Also have containers for the fuel that you remove and dispose of it
5. Attach the mini VCI cable and plug it into your laptop and connect to the car and turn it on, not into accessory mode it must be completely on. There were some complications with getting the software to allow tests and there may be a way of disabling the combustion engine to allow the Fuel Pump test to be run which is the winning option in the Techstream software. One thing I have discovered about the Prius C 2012 (I just bought a brand new Corolla Hybrid for my second car, what I nice piece of kit that is) is that despite all the scary messages put out by the screen the car is like all Toyota's incredibly robust. My background is Software and dealing with the Microsoft Blue screen of death has hardened me to programmers sending a message predicting imminent death.
6. I then started the pump test and within an hour 26 litres had been drained from the tank (luckily my local authority is having a chemicals disposal session ion 2 weeks time)
7. I added about 3 to 4 litres of petrol (for the USA members, gas) and ran the pump test to drain that.
8. Reattach the fuel hose to the fuel rail, clear all errors (if there any) in the ECU using Techstream, if the Aux battery has been drained then hook up the jump starter/fully charged battery using the instructions in the manual (for safety I wouldn’t recommend that you hook it directly to the Aux battery under the rear seat, probably wouldn’t be a problem but I was cautious here)
9. Press the start button, the engine started and recharged the hybrid battery and I then took the car for a 1 hour drive up to a hardware store I use and back home. I achieved a 2.8 lt/100km economy on the return trip (down hill) and the engine ran like a dream and my son is now using it to spend my money on tolls and fuel taking his girlfriend everywhere (that’s another gripe but not for PrisuChat I will have to go to a website that allows parents to complain about their kids, why did I want to be a father, I should of known because I was an idiot at his age as well)

Hybrid Message of Death;

This was easy once I got the Techstream software running, I hadn’t properly attached the Service Safety Plug, I hadn’t completed the attachment by pushing it down.

Techstream Software;

Please note the following;

The software in its current version 12 point something and I think 13 point something will only run on Windows 32bit operating systems. I have an emulator running on one of my Windows 10 laptops that is running Windows 7 32bit. I suggest you try and source an old laptop in reasonable condition that already has Windows 7 32 bit on it, I am going to test Techstream on a Windows 10 32bit laptop when I get around to it.

At some point I will load pictures and screen shots when I get a chance and my son isn’t driving his girlfriend everywhere. I hope this helps somebody the same way you have helped me, I suppose I am trying to pay it forward.

Cheers

Rob

 

Thanks for your welcome and the suggestion, where on the net do I go to sign up for it.