Southpark nailed it years ago...
Posted on 04/15/2019 2:31:04 AM PDT by Libloather
Jordan Felo had just finished hiking in the local mountains outside Portland, Ore., several weeks ago and was headed home in his 2010 Toyota Prius when it suddenly lost power and slowed to a crawl.
Felo had taken the Prius to a Toyota dealer a few weeks earlier for a 2018 safety recall. New software was installed to fix an overheating problem in the electrical power system. Yet when Felo hit the accelerator pedal, a key electronic component called an inverter overheated and fried itself.
“I was lucky nobody was behind me because I would have been rear-ended,” recalled Felo, a salesman at an REI retail store. The car was towed to the dealer, which gave Felo the bad news: It would cost $3,000 to replace the shoe-box sized unit.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
That doesn't sound good.
A part known by the manufacturer to be faulty installed a few years ago fails, and the customer is responsible?
Nice.
Nothing like limping along as you try to move across several lanes on an interstate where everyone else is going 70.
A part whose failure leads to catastrophic power loss. Sounds like a NHTSA opportunity.
I’ve got two Prius(2006 and 2010) each with over 220,000 miles and never had an issue. Just oil changes brakes and tires.
How long will it be before the first battery change?
If a gas powered car’s alternator goes out you have seconds to move over to the side of the road before the car dies. I know as it happened to me. At least a alternator is cheap to replace.
Was the inverter designed to last only as long as the warranty?
If a failed alternator shut down your engine instantly, you had bigger troubles than an alternator. Your battery has over an hour of run time. That you didn’t notice the charging system’s idiot light isn’t the alternator’s fault.
The battery’s fine as long as you keep fan filter clear. Honestly these are the best and cheapest to maintaincars I’ve ever owned
Without going into a lot of detail, there are exactly two brands I will never consider again, Toyota and Hyundai. If you gave me one today, I would sell it tomorrow at whatever price would guarantee it sold tomorrow.
What ticks me off more is why they even go into ‘Limp Home’ mode when the inverter fails. The reason should tick off owners too, particularly if it causes them an accident or close call. So here it goes:
1) The Hybrid battery is small and is not intended for continuous use - it is, for example, nowhere near the size of a Tesla battery. It might drive the vehicle 10 miles or so, and then the gasoline engine has to start up. The idea of the battery is to take energy that usually turns into heat (at the brake linings) in stop-and-go driving (city driving) and instead store that energy in the hybrid battery for the next green light. Doing so gives the car great mileage in city driving.
2) For long-distance highway driving, the battery is exhausted almost immediately and the car is direct-driven from its gasoline engine, which, by definition, must have sufficient power for that purpose. To repeat, if there is no battery power left, the gasoline engine is the propulsion source, and if the car still drives normally, then it is only because the gasoline engine is doing it.
3) So why the limp mode when the inverter dies, since it’s no different than having drained the battery? Answer - TO FORCE YOU TO GET IT FIXED. In other words, how do you get an owner to shell out 3,000 smackers to fix something that otherwise wouldn’t affect driving - something that only affects gas mileage, and then only in city driving. Answer - make the car drive like crap.
The one thing that I don’t know the answer to is whether Toyota forces ‘limp mode’ on the cars, or whether EPA does, as a condition of their mileage rating. But something tells me that its EPA.
Plus you are morally superior to everyone else.
We had one that caught fire. It was parked in our driveway, and I noticed all the windows were black I thought someone had painted it. I open the door and smoke came pouring out.
We were so lucky that it wasn’t parked in our garage. Our sons bedroom is right above the garage.
The pictures of it are amazing. It was all melted. It started in the battery. Back seat near the battery was melted and charred. The visors in front were melted and dripping down.
The one thing that I don’t know the answer to is whether Toyota forces ‘limp mode’ on the cars, or whether EPA does, as a condition of their mileage rating. But something tells me that its EPA.
_____________
It is the EPA fleet mandates that cause this sort of engineering.
Just like washers that only fill the tubs 3/4 way
And dishwashers that force us to run the hot water before using them, these manufacturers shift the energy use to the homeowner in order to meet the mandates.
All the lights on the dash starting blinking and the power started dying. It was the alternator at fault.
Southpark nailed it years ago...
They always do!
Poor liberals, they got stuck paying for exploding golf carts because they’re stupid.
On a side note...my sales job took me all over the upper midwest the past 12 years. The most agrivating drivers predominantly drove Toyotas. Go to Madison, WI and prove me wrong.
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