My prius will NOT start. I'm getting a message on the screen that says P lock is abnormal park in flat surface & apply brake. 1st I rarely got this message & after turning on & off the car, the car would turn back on but now it won't turn on at all. I have already bought a new 12v battery & that did not work. I have disconnected the computer inside the hybrid battery. I have looked at fuses. I have a plied the brake a bunch of times. My car still will not turn on. HELP
Is the battery you put in fully charged? Many, if not most, are not. Also, you could try this. It apparently worked for some people.
Yes I bought 2 batteries. 1 from Toyota & another from oreilys bc I thought maybe the battery from oreilys was just faulty
It sounds like you've tried a lot of things, but one I didn't see on the list was signing in at techinfo.toyota.com to pull up the repair manual and see what it says about tracking down the cause of "P lock abnormal". The information in there is usually pretty good. -Chap
TAIL just tells you whether the taillights (first position of headlight switch) are on. The only reason the display headunit even knows that is so it can change the color/brightness of the display at night. -Chap
The brake light switch turns on the brake lights. So, if the brake lights come on, the brake light switch is working.
I'd recommend just going straight to checking the things the repair manual says to check for that issue. Guessing takes time and doesn't fix the car. -Chap
The only time I've seen this message is when I tried to put car in gear while in accessory mode. Try pushing brake and pushing power button twice and see if that gets you to ready mode. Did you latch the orange safety plug correctly? It's a 3 step process: push in, flip up, and then push down. Many don't know to do the last step.
You bet. It's at techinfo.toyota.com and once you've registered, $15 gets you into the whole library for two days at a time. (And by the whole library, I don't just mean the full repair manuals and wiring diagrams for any Toyota out there, but also a whole section of Quick Technical Guides on different topics, all the service bulletins and warranty enhancements, and the course books for the "University of Toyota" technician training courses ... as deep as you ever want to go.) I would start in the Diagnosis section for the Hybrid Transaxle. You can sort of tell the times I've dropped another $15 into techinfo to look something up for myself, because then I give more in-depth answers to other people's PriusChat questions for about two days until the access runs out. But right now I haven't re-upped for a while, so I can't look around in there and direct you further. The P lock is, of course, a function of the hybrid transaxle and the transmission control ECU, and that diagnosis section would be my first place to look. -Chap
