Battery Struggling at only 50k Miles??

@fishandwhistle can you be more specific about the car’s hiatus; how often on average do you drive, how long are those drives, are there occasional, long downtimes (months), or no.

we’ve got similar miles on our ‘10, but the car invariably is driven about once weekly, and goodly, long drives (50+ kms) as oft as naught.

I suspect it’s long, multi-month downtimes that are the hardest on these batteries, there’s mention of this in Owner’s Manual.

 

No biggie. People say they live in the south, Can't get anymore south than Florida!

 

Also, How old is the 12v battery? If it's 6+ years, it might be time for a new one.
But, either way, you might want to consider a battery maintainer, since you don't drive much or far

 

Ours LIVES on one, necessity with low use.

 

Charging and balancing can help, but everything I've read on the topic suggests that doing that in the first few years of the car's life gives you some more time on the back end. Once you're already 10 years deep, there's less of a recovery to be made.

I think you should do more to shore up the overall diagnosis. It sounded like the 12v battery was really quite discharged, so get that settled first I think.

 

I could just be one cell that went bad, who knows. You should be able to check with the Dr Prius app and an ODB2 reader.

 

You can't possibly be this ignorant and still breathe.............

 

The biggest mistake a prius owner can make is to replace a hybrid battery with only 50k miles for something questionable.
These error codes may not mean anything after using the Hybrid Automotive charger and my fluorescent bulbs discharger.
Here is an example of how a battery with 3 weak modules and trouble codes turned into a completely working one.
2011 Prius with 156k miles.

Delta SOC 39.5%


3 weak modules with exclamation marks. The voltage was lower than on the other modules in the pack.


The voltage of these 3 modules after discharging the battery pack in the car to 40%, after using the Hybrid Automotive equipment. The whole battery was discharged 3 times to 3.8, 78 and 13.9 volts. The order of these voltages is not important. This is how I managed to discharge that battery. The most important voltage here, for this battery is 3.8 volts. Discharging it to 80 volts, as stated in the instructions from Hybrid Automotive, would not have fixed this battery.


I saw that prius today (a month later) and MPG was 46.1.