Vsc light on, Master triangle on & can't accelerate!

In general, dealer parts prices can be seen making big moves at weird times for weird or unknown reasons. It's some crazy mix of supply, demand, weight and warehouse space taken up by the part, allocation of manufacturer resources, and maybe twenty other things. Sometimes very high-turnover parts are expensive because of supply and demand, and sometimes very low-turnover parts are expensive because they sit around taking up warehouse space. Sometimes they're heavy. Sometimes they're light but big and weirdly shaped,

I remember first buying my gen 3 and seeing both underhood brake parts priced near $2k each, and then later saw them more like $700 each, and more recently they seem to be a bit higher again. I seem to remember the list price of the gen 1 steering gear going up around the time Toyota announced a free replacement program, and I figured they probably wanted to make sure they weren't selling too many over the counter to be able to have stock for the free replacements.

Why the price change on the battery? Who knows? Maybe in another six months or a year it'll go down again.

I haven't checked prices on batteries for other generations, to see if they've all gone up similarly, or if it's more the gen 3 and they might be shifting production more to other batteries.

Somebody inside Toyota probably knows, but most of us don't.