[fhenders]

My wife just went out to go somewhere and soon came running into the house to tell me that nothing was working. She had just backed out of the driveway and couldn't go forward. All the normal lights were on on the dash when you first start up, the car couldn't be turned off, the key couldn't be extracted, no gear was indicated and moving the lever wouldn't do anything. I tried all the buttons and gears and nothing worked. It was just dead in the water. I can't remember if the ICE had started or not. At this point I can't remember what I finally did. I think I moved the lever to P from D or R and the dash lights went out and I was able to put it in Drive. I should have taken better notice of exactly what I was doing, but too late now. Anybody had anything like that occur? If the IGN is on (no break applied at startup) can the car roll backwards?

 

[RSnyder]

Did you happen to notice a buzzer sound? If your wife shifted from R to D while the car was still rolling, it would "reject" the request and go to N while sounding a buzzer. If she then went to P while trying to figure out what happened, but didn't realize it, she might not have been pressing the brake pedal to get out of P. Well, its a long shot, and doesn't seem to explain the lack of gear indication.

 

[mrv]

Perhaps she went into gear when the car wasn't in READY or perhaps was only on IG-ON?

 

[fhenders]

Back again...

My wife's home now and she can't think of what she might have done. Now that I think about it, when I got into the car it was in IG-ON. Actually she had stopped in the street (not much traffic around here) to come back in the house for something. She has no idea what she did before leaving the car or immediately upon getting back in. Somehow or another she got it into IG-ON. What I can't figure out is why it wouldn't turn off when I pressed the Power switch. Anyway, thanks for your responses.

 

[JRjr]

This problem sounds very much like what is described in a post in the General section from about a week ago: http://www.priusonline.com/viewtopic.php?t=1932

I experienced it the one time that I described in my reply to that post but not since then.

 

[kjb516]

A few times since I’ve owned my Prius, I have noticed “odd” happenings similar to what you describe upon starting up. Thinking that I may have some issue with my new Prius, I began to actively observe what I was doing during startup.

What I found was that at times, I was not pressing the brake hard enough (or early enough) before pressing the Start button. In fact, one time, I was actually pressing the accelerator (a throwback to my old carburetor engines) instead of the brake. Since I’ve started more closely observing, I have not encountered anymore startup “issues”. Hopefully this is your only problem.

After encountering each odd “startup”, I have found that holding the Start button (for around 10 seconds?) has always shutdown properly.

 

[fhenders]

Say, thanks for that link. Sounds like I'm not alone in the wilderness after all. Guess I'll do a little experimenting to see if I can get it to happen again. If I can remember to (getting a little old, you know) I'll report my findings.