Prius (2004-09) :: 2005 - Massive Hybrid Battery Discharge In First 2-3 Miles
Jul 12, 2016
My car is an 05 and currently has 219,000 miles. Runs great. Only things I've replaced are the 12 volt battery and the rack and pinion. Replaced the rack because I was trying to drift in the snow and tried to beat the traction control. Needless to say, I lost and hit the curb. Jammed the gear in the left side of the rack. Replaced the rack with a $75 used one and no problems since.
My issue is this, even if my battery is at 6 bars when I first take off, my hybrid battery drains down to even as low as 1 bar. It only got down to 1 once but is hitting 2 regularly. After about 3-10 miles it is back to the regular charge rate. I also noticed the other day with the window down, there was a slight whirring sound, almost like a gear or wheel that is a gummed up and is being slowed down. It also felt like there was resistance, almost like the brake was dragging. After a few miles, as in less than 5, the noise was gone and the car was going along just fine. I've checked the emergency brake to see if it's dragging by applying it and releasing it several times. Does not appear to be the issue. Today I put it in neutral to see if that changed anything but it did like it always does and just coasted along fine with no resistance. My thought is the transmission. I'm wondering if the fluid it so old and broken down that maybe things are gumming up. Either way, I purchased the tranny fluid and will change that out. I know people will probably gasp but I have never changed it. Actually thought because it's a cvt and there is no dipstick to check it, that it doesn't need changed. After reading up yesterday I discovered I was mistaken.
I think that's about it. I'll edit it if I think of something more. Once the battery is back up to charge it accelerates and drives like normal. I do want the car to last so my daughter can use it when I buy the new Prius Prime.
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2006 Prius with 130k miles. I'm thinking that my HV battery has slowly deteriorated to the point where it's causing drivability issues, and now needs to be replaced.
The main symptoms I'm experiencing are rapid charge/discharge according to the MFD and significant loss of power once the battery has discharged to one bar. I realize the latter is "normal," but the problem is that I'm seeing one bar frequently now. Hill climbs that my car used to do with no problem and would drain the SOC to 2-3 bars now cause the battery to drain to 1 bar about half-way up and then loss of speed from 65 mph to 45 mph by the time I reach the top. Descending hills, it's not unusual to see the SOC go from 2 bars to 7-8 bars within 30 seconds or so.
I'm not seeing any error lights, and my (cheap) code reader does not report any logged DTCs.
This seems to be a slow degradation of battery performance, rather than an outright failure. I first noticed that the battery would charge/discharge a little quicker than it had been at about 90k miles. At 99k (before the warranty ended) I took it into the dealer and they tested the HV battery. Block voltages ranged from 16.59 to 16.68 V and resistances ranged from 0.025 to 0.026 ohms. Based on this, they said that the battery was fine, and sent me on my way. Since then, the problem has just gotten worse and worse, though.
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About 20 minutes ago I started up the car and the screen indicated the main battery was pretty much empty. And hour before I had pulled into my driveway and the battery had indicated maybe 70%+. The car was off, nothing like headlights or anything I know of was left on.
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Trying to figure out whether to fix or scrap our 2005 Prius with 193,000 miles and a mysterious 12V battery problem. What would you do in my situation?
We've had a recurring problem with the 12V accessory battery: I have replaced it myself three times. The last failure was the most mysterious, because after replacing the 12V battery for the third time, I conducted nearly daily voltage tests using the Prius' "secret" vehicle signal check. Voltage coming off of the 12V was normal, if not high the entire time in all of the Prius's various starting and ready modes. I wired up a solar panel to trickle-charge the 12V battery when we weren't around, and we plugged the 12V in at night to a trickle charger to keep the battery topped up.
Nonetheless the day came a few months after the latest replacement when we had our usual 12V failure symptoms: the time on the clock started resetting, the car didn't turn on on the first press, the Prius computer rebooted, and eventually the car wouldn't start without a jump start. This has been super-frustrating, and googling around, I haven't been impressed by people's reported experiences trying to have the dealer try to resolve such problems. My worry is that a dealer repair person will change the accessory 12V battery without fixing the underlying problem. I would suspect a parasitic draw somewhere, but voltage tests when the car was overnighted without any kind of charging did not suggest a serious voltage draw on the 12V battery.
Other details about the car: our keyless entry hasn't worked for several years (dead batteries in the key fob?) and we open the car manually using the key each time. We stick the fob in the slot each time we want to start it. MPG is comparatively low vs. other Priuses, perhaps 44-45 MPG, and lower when the 12V battery starts to die (37-40). I have had the car serviced (oil, etc.) like clockwork every three months; recently, I've noticed the engine is starting to burn oil a bit (level is reported low on each change).
Most of the driving has been done in the flats and the heat of California's Central Valley, and we've put something like 120,000 miles on it just in the last five years. Besides the fact that the 12V battery keeps dying, the car has been very reliable.
We just inherited a free Prius with just 60,000 miles on it, and I have a 1993 Camry with 150k miles on the chassis and maybe 60k miles on the replacement engine I had dropped into it a few years ago. The Camry just passed California's smog test and seems to be running well. We don't want or need three cars.
Our choice is to try to fix the Prius with 193k miles on it and donate the Camry (which gets about 20 miles to the gallon, the horror...), or keep the Camry and donate the Prius. My instinct is to not drop thousands of dollars into the high-mileage Prius, especially if these issues might be pointing to a dying main battery.
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I have a 2005 with 165K on it. Just within the last 2 weeks, at start up, no matter what level the charge shows on the display, the HV battery will almost fully discharge and then come back up to full charge within a mile of driving. I just replaced the 12V battery thinking this could have been an issue, but it didn't change anything. The car never acted like this since I bought it in 05. When it drops to the discharge level, It running on ICE only, with the typical slower acceleration. What could be going on?
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A year and a half ago, I had the hybrid battery warning lights come on and had it towed to the dealer. After given the option of replacing the battery for $4300, I took it home and did a single cell replacement (all cells ~8V, one at 6.6V which I replaced), which seemed to be all good until yesterday. Back with the warning lights and blower fan, I jumped to the conclusion that I have a similar situation, removed the battery and all cells are 8.04V +/- .05V except for 1 cell at 7.92. I am not convinced that this cell is really the culprit.
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My 2005 prius will not start. We had some body work done to it after a deer ran into me. They did a small amount of welding and had disconnected both batteries. Now the car will not start. It can be put in auxiliary mode but if you try to start it with your foot on the brake, it flashes some lights for a few seconds and then goes dead. Is the hybrid battery too low to start the car? It was pretty low. before the batteries were disconnected. Or did they possibly do something wrong when they disconnected the hybrid battery? Final question would be do they have to do some reprogramming after disconnecting the hybrid battery?
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I replaced the hybrid battery in my 2005 Prius today & when I disconnected the 12v battery the wrench arced & I assume that I blew a fuse. I have looked, but have not found anything. I hope I am missing something obvious.
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The car was low and I added enough oil to bring back to full. 1800 miles later, engine dipstick reading at end tip of dipstick. Added a quart, was full. Drove around 80 miles. It was low again. It has a huge film of oil spray all over the back end and it seems to be leaking a lot of oil. It's in a kind of square patterning the driveway. Not just one drip. This is my first Prius.
2005 Prius Package 3 132k
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Very occasionally and usually from a cold start I get a rapid discharge of the battery.
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This evening, long after sundown, I found myself stuck on an unmoving expressway with no sign of traffic starting up again (the radio reported a vehicle fire ahead, all lanes blocked). Time dragged on, and I started worrying about the possibility of the headlights draining the 12V battery , assuming that they do indeed run off the 12V battery. In a conventional car this wouldn't have been a problem because the idling engine would have maintained enough battery charge, but of course here the ICE wasn't running. So I turned off the power button to shut down the lights (it's a Canadian car, so there's no way of turning off the headlights with the power button on). That was safe in this particular situation because there were plenty of stopped vehicles behind me. It definitely would not have been safe if mine had been the last vehicle in the lineup.
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A friend of mine has a 2005 Prius, and was asking what his mileage would be when the hybrid battery dies. He has about 131k miles on it, and the battery dies out very quick right now. I told him that with a 1.5L engine, he should get at least 40mpg with the hybrid battery being dead.
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I just bought 05 prius from a dealer I don't know the history was told all it needed was a hybrid battery.
Now I have a 05 that I drive with known good parts so I pulled my hybrid battery and installed it in the new car the monitor showed engine charging inverter then going to the battery. However the bars on the battery graph start dropping. only code is a engine code 2102.
I also noticed the old A/C condenser in the back.
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The battery gauge on my 2007 seems to be dropping much faster than it used to. I can back out of my driveway with full green, and be down to purple in two miles of <45MPH driving. It also seems to recharge faster, as if the 'window' of usable charge has become much narrower.
I took it in for the 45K service, and asked the dealer to investigate. The tech wrote that everything is fine, and that this behavior is normal because "this is deep cycle battery".
Two questions: If the main battery fails completely, will the car still be driveable or will I be stranded at that point?
The little 12V battery is still the original that came with the car. Could it cause the above symptoms?
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I'm new to this technology. I bought 2008 t spirit prius . The battery drains in couple of miles. I don't know what to check .
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First time I've ever noticed it at least. And she's been on 2 huge x-country road trips with much hotter temps than the other day.
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My concern: The hybrid battery, or the monitor really, has never, ever, not once, shown an all-bars charge. It is almost always at one bar down, and will drop below that but never goes above. My brother has a Gen I and his battery shows all bars from time to time. Not mine.
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My hybrid battery has been running low the past few days. This has never happened before, but it has been around 90 degrees out during the same few days. I noticed it this morning as I left for work. It was down to two bars when pulling out of the garage. I was getting pretty nervous, but at least the ICE was charging it. Although, it never fully charged the system, as I live pretty close to work. On the way home, I tried to drive around for a mile or so to see if I could get the battery fully charged.. The best I could do was four bars. Is this typical of the hybrid system in warm weather? Should I be worried about it? Also, the system has a fan, why doesn't it come on if the hybrid battery is so temp sensitive?
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I recently purchased a used 2007 prius. The car has not been driven for some time. I won it in an auction from a used/wreaked car lot and am in the process of fixing it up. I need to know if it is possible to charge the hybrid battery when the car is idling or will this only discharge the hybrid battery and if so, is there any way to charge the hybrid battery other than driving the car?
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i have a 2006 with almost 200k miles. Got the red triangle, check engine light, and the red car at the top of the MFD. I ran the codes and got P3000. Does this sound like traction battery failure? The car still turns on and ICE still cycles off and on.
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I changed a bad cell in my hybrid battery (only one cell was bad) and put everything back together and it wont start. I've double checked all connections, fuses, everything I took off. I put the orange plug back in, fiddled with it, pushed it in more. It's got a brand new 12V battery and I dropped it off at autozone to get it charged up as well. Here are some pics and what it's showing .....
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