What's this plug near the spare tire?

does it go to the 12v?

 

Hard for me to tell if that's four terminals, red, orange, skyblue, white-black, or there's an extra orange in there somewhere. Can you describe it in some more detail?

Does it look related to that white connector taped down to the wire harness nearby?

This post shows a general example of how to work through the wiring diagram to identify a particular connector starting with its location.

 

If you had SKS (smart key) on your prius, that connector would plug into the luggage compartment oscillator (widget that talks to the smart key fob).

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My sks system isn't working, should I check this by chance?

 

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2004 - 2009 TOYOTA PRIUS DRIVER DOOR OSCILLATOR KEYLESS SENSOR MODULE OEM | eBay

 

Looks like a dycquefoure

 

I'd have recognized one of those. Back home they were always in aisle 3, next to the henways.

 

I assume the usual suspects have been gone over (ie, the sks disable button isn't "off", the batteries in BOTH of your known good previously working fobs have been replaced).

I seldom have fixed anything "by chance". (Unfortunately) I rely on diagnosis and testing. Part of that testing would be to fully charge and load test the 12V battery. Then I would use a compatible scan tool such as Techstream to talk to the smart key ecu and see if it has anything to say about the problem.

If there were any codes then I would look in the relevant section of the factory service manual and follow the testing procedures there. Should I reach the conclusion that the luggage compartment oscillator should indeed be replaced, THEN I would do so.

There are too many things involved in the SKS to "load up the parts cannon" and be successful.

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When I was younger I took lots of stuff apart. Often that was as much about just seeing how it was made as about thinking I could fix it.

But I was always amazed at how often something that wasn't working would be 'fixed' just by my taking it apart and putting it back together and doing absolutely nothing else to it.

Of course that didn't really mean it got fixed by doing nothing ... it means getting it all apart and back together involved doing a lot of things I wasn't really keeping track of, and in all of that, something affected the problem.

It has also been helpful for me to keep that in mind, for those times when I do a lot of steps to change one thing on purpose. If the problem is fixed after that, it could be because of the one thing I did on purpose, but that's not always a sure thing.

 

Yeah, that kind of "fixes itself after I touched it" stuff makes my OCD twitch. Is it really fixed? Or is it just waiting to glitch again. That is (one of the many) definitions of the word- intermittent - aka to technicians as "hell".

I REALLY like to find my "smoking gun" - something I can document, in triplicate, and hang up on the wall in a pretty frame. If I can't show or prove that something is bad, then how do I know that whatever I do will repair the problem?

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