Intermittent temporary loss of power

Hi everyone,

I wanted to ask about an issue to see if anyone knows what’s happening before I try to address it with the dealer. I tried searching for a similar issue in threads already on the site but couldn’t really find it. Let me give you some background:

2022 Prius Limited, roughly 46k miles, purchased in 2021 by first owner, I bought it a year ago with 39k miles. Based on Carfax the powertrain warranty remains for about a year/14k more miles. It’s had absolutely no other problems besides this one, as I’ve come to expect from my Priuses (this is my 3rd) over the years.

In the time I’ve had it, it’s happened 3 times now, roughly every 3 months. During normal driving, I come to a full stop. Light turns green, put my foot on the gas pedal, and it barely moves forward. I press the pedal down more, get a little more movement but still just a crawl. People behind me start honking, so now I’m nervous, and I pump the gas trying to get it to launch. After about 4-5 seconds of this, suddenly it’s back and pulls away like normal. No warning lights, no system messages. And then it’s completely fine for another 3 months.

I haven’t taken it in yet because I have experience with dealerships and their primary objective is profit, not people. I know for a fact that if they drive it around for 20 minutes and the “customer states” part can’t be replicated (and they get no codes on the OBD) they’d probably just charge me $95 for an hour of labor.

My gen 3 (2013) Prius did have the recall performed for that inadvertent limp mode issue but even that car never exhibited this symptom. Does that issue come up in the 2022s?

Would love to hear your thoughts, including how to address with the dealer.