2004 Gen 2 slew of problems

Basically you have an over 20-year-old battery you can do the chicken dances and replace cells and buy chargers and hobby chargers and have a great fun time but a lot of during that time you won't be driving the car. So you have an extra everything is wonderful no problem I just went through this whole business on my 09 I have an 05 sitting here in the driveway too that is not used both cars had exactly the same things if you described and posted here with your tech stream charts and all that The minute the hybrid battery was replaced not fooled with or played with or hobby charged or any of that I went to Toyota and bought a battery on sale for 1464 bolted my front end to that new rack of sales which is the computer and whatnot put that in the car and the car went right back up to 51 miles to the gallon all the lights went off etc so your answer is when you do that you'll be back to pretty much normal until your brakes fail and you need the accumulator pump or actuator whatever they're getting harder to find but don't worry we can get them off of import cars to the JDM suppliers so you're 04 should be able to be kept on the road for another 20 years easily

 

Not all of them. Two of them. The C1259 and C1310 are ABS/VSC codes that only mean other codes have been set in the HV control or battery ECUs. Those two codes will go away when the underlying HV and battery codes do.

The C1241 is a different story. That's a problem with the 12 volt power supply arriving at the brake components. It doesn't always mean a problem with the 12 volt battery specifically, because it has to do with power arriving at the brakes, so the wiring and connectors. etc., on that path are also suspects. But seeing this code always gives you a good reason to check the 12 volt supply carefully, if you haven't already.

The voltages shown in your C1241 freeze frame are all kinda low, with nothing above 11 and VM1 and VM2 below 10. The subcode 83 indicates that the brake capacitor box asserted the "capacitor mode signal" for more than 3 seconds while the car was in READY mode. While the manual doesn't really explain this further, my guess is it means the regular 12 volt system voltage got low enough for the capacitor box to say "I'm taking over", and of course it only stores a limited amount of juice.

The P0A08-264 is only set when all three of these things happen: (1) the car's DC/DC converter detects an internal malfunction, (2) it enters fail-safe mode, (3) the aux battery (which now isn't being charged) drops below 11 volts.

As the DC/DC converter is what keeps the 12 volt battery charged, I suspect this is the most pressing problem you have right now. You can bring the 12 volt battery back up with a charger, but it won't stay charged until the DC/DC converter is fixed. Other voltage-related issues like the C1241 will be recurring until you have a working converter keeping the 12 volt battery charged.

Your P0A80 and P3019 are separate issues involving the traction battery, and will need attention at some point, but I would attend to the converter first.

 

Recently another fellow found is lower radiator was plugged pretty badly and apparently that's the section of radiator that is carved out for the inverter cooling section I guess the upper section of the radiator is used for the ice engine or what have you I think it's a two-part split system or something I'm not real sure but apparently this guy cleaned the bottom half of his radiator and that made an immediate difference if I'm not mistaken or he noticed it right away or something to that effect.

 

I just looked over the P0A08 troubleshooting steps myself, and they look sort of reasonable to me. The order they have you check things in is about more than just what might be likely.

You could end up needing a new inverter with converter assembly. That might even be likely. But in their troubleshooting, they put that possibility last, after having you check 20 other things.

Why? Because there are that many other things it could be. And even if a problem with the inverter/converter itself is likely, that's more expensive and a bigger deal to change, and you would feel goofy if you went to that trouble and still had the problem because it was really some simpler other thing all along. So they have you check for those other things first.

 

Also, the troubleshooting chart is "diagnosis by exclusion". Toyota doesn't give you much of anything about what specifically goes on (or goes wrong) inside the inverter-converter itself (the "black box").

So they have you confirm that everything else works- if the problem persists then the only thing left is the inverter assembly.

One thing I find that is curious. On a number of hybrid system faults, the charts want you to check all the bits for the cooling system. However, I don't see any mention of monitoring the inverter temperature sensor readings with a scantool.

I might think that if an overheat condition was causing a code or shutdown, then you would see it in the data. Conversely, if all the temperatures remained in "normal" ranges, you could remove a cooling problem from the list of likely causes.


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Oh gosh, it looks to me like step 5 (in whatever edition of 2004 manual I'm looking in anyway) is all botched up.

In my experience, this is unusual, and the Toyota repair manuals are amazingly free of mistakes for the most part. But this looks like an exception.

I was going to answer your question about the resistance range setting by saying I normally look at what the manual is showing as the value that you should expect. I set the range to whatever'd be a good fit for the expected value. If the measured value is below that, you'll see it, and if the measured value is way higher, you may just see an overrange display, but that's enough to tell you what you need.

But a lot of cases are even simpler than that, because there are only certain sorts of devices (sensors, motors, relay coils, solenoids, ...) where there is some actual target resistance you're supposed to find.

In a lot of other tests in the manual, like wiring tests here, they will just be saying to expect something like "below 1Ω" (by which they're only saying "this should conduct very well, like a solid connection") or "above 10 MΩ" (by which they're just saying "this isn't supposed to conduct at all, and if it does you have insulation damage or some kind of short").

The tests they're giving in step 5 are of the "below 1Ω" variety, so really, they're just having you check that the fusible link block conducts, where it's supposed to.

But they are having you check between those terminals and body ground, which is dead wrong. The Gen 2 link block doesn't go on the grounded battery terminal, it goes on the + one. If any of those tests really showed "below 1Ω" to body ground, you'd have fireworks! If you are getting overrange readings on those tests, that's a good thing.

I would be checking for resistance between those terminals (of the link block itself, not the wires that plug in) to the + post of the battery, and I would expect those readings to be below 1Ω.

I should mention that your normal intuition should be to avoid making resistance measurements somewhere voltage is present. The reason you can think here about measuring from those link block terminals to the + battery post is because by unplugging those cables, you've isolated that thing from anything else, and you can see from the test it's supposed to conduct, so it should now all be at the same voltage as the + post it's sitting on, and there won't be any voltage difference to confuse the meter.

Also, I don't think both terminals of F16 are used. According to the wiring diagram, the one that matters (counterintuitively enough) is F16-2. I wonder who wrote this troubleshooting section, and what they're doing now.

I am sorry that your first essay into troubleshooting with a multimeter has to start with troubleshooting the manual! As I mentioned, the manuals are mostly very good and that hardly ever happens, but this just seems to be your lucky day.

 

DC/DC-S is the small five-amp fuse. (The mnemonic "DC/DC-S" means the voltage Sensing wire for the DC/DC converter; not the fat wire that actually carries the juice, but the skinny one that allows the converter to read the battery voltage without being thrown off by voltage drop from the juice flowing in the fat one.)

But I kind of see why you're asking, because (in the edition of the manual I'm looking at) the heading for step 7 says "CHECK FUSIBLE LINK BLOCK ASSEMBLY (100A DC/DC-S)", which is all kinds of bogus. The DC/DC-S fuse is 5A, not 100A, the only other fuse there is called MAIN, not DC/DC-S, the MAIN fuse is 120A, not 100A, there is a 100A DC/DC fuse (no -S) but it's way up front under the hood, not back here, and you already confirmed both the fuses back here are good anyway, with your .9Ω results at F15 and F16-2.

I'm not sure what the person writing this manual section was on, but I might want some.

In the Toyota manuals, "fusible link block assembly" refers unambiguously to the thing hanging on the battery + terminal.

The long white thing in the underhood fuse box, with the multiple fuse links in it, is just called "Unit A" in the wiring diagram. (In the repair manual, it kind of doesn't even get its own name; they keep referring to the individual links in it, like DC/DC, ABS-1, ABS-2, etc., as if they were separate fuses you could replace.)

But sure enough, the long white thing in the parts catalog shows up as "fusible link block assy", so I understand the confusion.

The repair manuals/wiring diagrams seem to come from one team, and the parts catalog seems to come from another, and it often seems as if the teams don't chat as much as you might want them to.

I'm sorry there's been so much weirdness in this written procedure (a lot more than I usually see in their manuals). But it does seem to me, at least, that the tests you've done so far have satisfactorily eliminated the fusible link block assembly (the one on the battery + terminal ) as a suspect.

 

Quick question, at this point, what voltage reading do you get across the 12V battery when you go to ready mode?

Most of the diagnostic steps in the manual assume that you have no function at all (ie, it's broken right now).


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