Is one cell showing on the battery display always bad news?

Toasted. This will traumatize her and take public transportation for life. One bar on a 2013 hv bat will strand her soon.

 

Force charge the car in the parking lot in my generation too and I think the three put the car in drive step on the brake floor the gas pedal and watch your display for the HV battery in the generation 3 you have no colors generally speaking so you're looking for all those little LED greeny lines to go all the way up to the top it won't take but about a minute or something like that no the engine's not going to blow up if it's rattling and sounding crazy obviously turn it off but if everything sounds normal and the engine's going round and round and everybody's happy it'll take about I don't know a minute a minute and 10 seconds and you should see your bars going right up to the top of the scale then after that happens you can run a free doctor Prius check and see what your state of charge is or SOC and some other numbers you can post that up here after you posted a couple of times and everybody will talk about your battery the car is old generally the Panasonic EV batteries that are in these cars generally make close to 10 years when new so you do the math and see where you are just by basic logic 2013 car 2025. I'm going to guess that maybe your friends never had to do anything with the hybrid battery is that a good guess if so then you will be if they hadn't had anything done with the brakes as in the parts mounted on the firewall called an actuator and the whatever the other part is you might be doing those two about $2,500 worth of work unless you can step in and do a good bit of it it is a pain in the butt for this car. And then of course the famous head gasket rattle engine problem flying apart throwing a rod so maybe due diligence wasn't performed when we thought the car was pretty and cute and would make a great driver for our 16 year old because of the gas mileage things were left out of that search unfortunately so now here we are like grit said above this can make or break somebody's first experience with an automobile so there is always that I don't know what you and your wife drive. But at this point I would try to force charge it run the doctor please see where we are if the car is running reasonable and doing okay let her get her permit and her license and drive it a little bit and at the first cent of funny business then make your choices depending upon where that falls I don't think you can get out of the car now because you own it and you bought it so there's always that personally if it was my daughter because I work on nonsense and what have you I would sell this to my buddy that loves those generation threes and get her a Yaris possibly a generation too if I was wanting to keep it up for her just depends at this point in the game I'd probably get her a Yaris and not look back and not have to maintain it very good car no funny business no batteries no weirdness close to the mileage of a Prius without all the hubbub

 

This is not true. One bar on the HV battery just means that the charge is low. The OP just needs to drive the car, and the HV battery will charge. The car needs to be driven every two weeks to keep the car in good condition.