It was a long uphill, steep enough that I had to go into my usual just-touching-3000-RPM hillclimb mode [about 30 HP output]. After a while it leveled off a bit and I saw another steep pitch ahead, but could back off power for a little while until I reached it. . When I did, the output power ceased entirely and I drifted into a convenient side pulloff, with the car now seeming completely dead in the water. The dash VFD was still mostly lit, but without the READY indicator. Almost like I had held the power button down but for some reason left strangely a little more "powered up" than that. There was no warning or triangle. Okay, Wth? Maybe it was one of those Scangauge network glitches except those do usually throw a big hairy error. . I went to reboot, except that now the car wouldn't READY up at all. Just IG-ON state, and still no warnings. I flipped the panel voltmeter over to 12V bus, and saw the needle wandering around between about 8 and 10 volts. *Wavering*, not steady. Oops, okay, some sort of really bizarre 12V problem but even if the 12V battery was dead, why wasn't the DC/DC converter holding the system up during the hillclimb?? Maybe the converter had just overheated and eaten itself, ut-oh. Like in the teardown pictures, possibly necessitating a new DC/DC board. . The sinking feeling in the pit of my guts brought me sort of half awake, and I realized that *I* was overheated and wikkid thirsty. Something had been trying to tell me, evidently in terms that my "Prius pilot hindbrain" would understand, that there was a problem with *my* electrolytes and I needed to get up and add water. Side effect of going climbing last night and then eating some salty chips when I got home, perhaps... . No really, the car's fine, not to mention completely uninvolved in this little event. Although lately I've been noticing that the Yellowtop I put in there 2 years ago has been giving slightly less voltage when supplying loads in non-READY mode, so perhaps that factoid was in the subconscious somewhere. My usual car-related sleep imagination involves healthy paranoia about uncontrollable situations and imminent crashes, which helps keep me humble about what could happen on the road. . _H*
Well, they do say that dreams are caused by your subconscious trying to tell you something.... and in this case it's telling you that your battery IS about to die... and to get it checked out asap.
This is just like One Pip left weirdness. Nothing but good experience with miles & miles of blinking pip ... then WHAM! No ICE immediately upon the first blink. oh ... it was just a dream (Like they said in "Up in Smoke") ohhh, I've done that. .
