Hi I'm new to this not sure if I'm doing it right. I have a 2004 Prius, referb battery pack put on last year. Dealer just told us our inverter is bad. This is what we were told. your Prius inverter was quoted at $5695 plus tax ..arrgghhh ,, $4783 part and $912 labor.. let me know if you want to order it up . Is this typical? The car was given to me two years ago from my mom. It has 186,000 miles. The car isn't it worth it, but could it extend the car longer?
yup. They are available very easily and inexpensively ($50-100ish) in the used parts world. I have 3 sitting in the shop, just in case I ever need one. Interested in seeing what the actual codes were, as inverter failure is fairly rare on the Gen 2s. Not unheard of, just fairly rare.
We periodically get people who pay the stealership a fortune for a new Gen2 Inverter only to find out that it wasn't the source of the problem because Toyota Stealerships tend to replace the most expensive parts on the car before doing a more through diagnosis to maximize rather than minimize how much money they take out of your wallet. I've had numerous experiences where all the error codes point to a bad inverter and then after further study the problem turns out to be elsewhere. And I live a couple hours south of you if ever need more help?
I'd sharpen that a little more by saying that there scarcely are any trouble codes that "point to a bad inverter". That's the key thing about diagnosing a car based on trouble codes: the codes don't tell you a specific part is bad. They tell you an ECU noticed a specific thing. The specific thing is in the repair manual (more info) under "detection condition" on the first page of troubleshooting workup for the code. The job of the diagnostician is to find out why that ECU saw that specific thing, and not to go swapping any given part until it's been shown that a problem with that part was the reason.
Exactly! Once you study how many different functions the Inverter performs it's easy to understand why. It's kinda like having a problem with your liver. There's so many things a liver does that there's gonna be lots of testing on many different systems before they determine an accurate diagnosis. Of course if you were a Toyota Dealership you'd just sell the patient a liver transplant instead and if you were wrong and it was something else, it's ok because you don't have to give all the money back for being wrong.
