How to Remove Prius Gen 5 UFO (Vehicle Proximity Notification System - VPNS) Sound

The gen5 actually has a pretty pleasant door chime. More musical than the typical annoying chirp/beep.

 

Has anyone unplugged the harness at the avas controller?
The might be a chance that an error would be displayed.
I wonder where it might be?

 

So, Grandma got ran over by the reindeer because it had disabled its notification speaker. Who knew? An Early Merry Christmas to one and all!

 

Buried:

 

That's the computer that controls the speaker, not the speaker itself. Darn near 100% chance that'll you'll get errors if you remove a computer.

 

I thought if it was easy to get to, try unplugging the connector. I read one possibly relevant post on a Rav4 forum. Its controller is easier to get to though. Just killing time. I'll see if I can live with the racket first.

 

If it was a part that was only on North American cars, that could maybe work. But all Priuses worldwide have that computer installed. And it's the same part number worldwide(one for HEV and one for PHEV). I've got to believe the main ECUs are expecting to talk to that computer and will start sending error codes if it's unplugged.

But if you're okay with error codes, why not just unplug the speaker in the grille? It would do the same thing and be a lot easier to get at. And if you follow the instructions at the beginning of the thread, you can rig it to not throw an error. You'll lose the exterior chimes, but you'd lose that anyway if you unplugged the computer that controls the speaker.

 

I'm not. I thought I read a post where the guy removed the connector to the controller and it didn't throw a warning. But if you have to take the whole dash apart to get to it, forget about it.

Almost seems to be a common thread-the DCM module is also hard to get to. There are what, at least 10 or so modules? On my 2000 TDI, it was pretty easy to get to the engine ECM to swap it out with one with modified mapping. I think that was pre-CAN BUS. I'm way behind on this stuff.