2012 Prius V died. Third party shop and dealer are unsure what the issue is.

Hi folks,

I bought a 2012 Toyota Prius V in May of this year with 82k miles and now sits around 88k. I performed an oil change at roughly 6.5k miles which was 2 weeks ago. I am the second owner of this car and it was sold new in the state where I currently live. I did this purposely as I live in the SW and coming from the NE I didn’t want to deal with rust. When I bought the Carfax it showed nothing out of the ordinary: clean title, 1 owner, all your typical services, oil changes, emissions, etc all done at the dealership. I did some research that this gen of Prius is known for EGR/intake cleaning and was in the planning stages of performing the work, probably once I got closer to 100k.


This past weekend I did a 900 mile road trip and the car ran flawlessly. I was averaging 42 mpg and over the entire ownership I’ve averaged 47 mpg. Upon returning I stopped off at the store and when I went to leave the car ran for 2 minutes and completely died. I was able to run off the hybrid battery to park into a spot and have it towed. I ran my own code reader and it was showing 3 codes: P0171 (System Too Lean Bank 1), P3190, and P3191. I do have the Dr. Prius app and the bluetooth reader as I performed a battery test when I bought the car (it showed good state of health). I did not think to run the test after the breakdown once I saw that it was engine issues, my mistake.


I took it to a mechanic who ran the codes, tried clearing them, and tried starting the vehicle which died right away. They found that this model/year Prius has an open recall for the Intelligent Power Module inside the inverter was failing, they recommended that I take it to the dealership to perform recall work, which I did.


The dealership told me that this was not part of that recall so I asked them to show me all service records that they had from the car (I told them that I had data showing that all routine services were done here). They were able to show me that an ECU warranty was completed in June of 2016 to reprogram the MG ECU or Power Management ECU. It also shows a second hybrid update to the power management ECU that was completed in June 2019 (The documentation shows J0V01B =.7).


The dealership wants to perform a Hybrid battery rescue charge which they quoted $775 for. They also quoted me for a replacement hybrid battery system at $3,900. My concern is that once I talked to the Toyota technician who worked on the car he seemed unsure if it’s the engine or battery system. They want to run this rescue charge to see if it’s the battery, but if the battery comes back fine, I’m back to square one.

Anyone have any thoughts or ideas?

 

This was resolved. The PSV kicked off a hose, but the battery SOC is around 7% so they will need to run the charge cycle on the HV battery.

 

I brought my bluetooth scanner and used Dr. Prius to verify that the battery would charge. I got it from 3% to full. They were baffled and I walked out free of charge.