Sparks Fly Over Report of Prius Battery Problems

A recent column about a Century City couple’s problems with a Prius hybrid that wouldn’t keep a charge (“Couple Say They Get No Charge Out of Their Toyota Prius,” Highway 1, Aug. 7) elicited a slew of e-mail from readers.

Many defended the Prius and chastised me for writing about a problem that Toyota officials characterized as an isolated incident. But there were almost as many messages suggesting that the problem was more common than Toyota admitted.

The Aug. 7 column dealt with a letter from a Century City woman (who asked to remain unidentified) who complained that her 2002 Prius battery kept draining and that her dealer’s service manager told her and her husband that nothing was wrong with the car and that they weren’t driving it enough to keep the batteries charged.

The Prius is propelled by a combination of gasoline engine and electric motor and uses two kinds of batteries: a small one to provide initial starting power and another, larger unit that provides juice to propel the vehicle.

First, a few Prius defenders:

“I’m surprised you would print a major article on one buyer’s bad experience,” wrote Alice Remer of Corona del Mar. “I am the owner of a Prius [and] have never had trouble starting it.”

Reader Bruce Snyder questioned whether the column was an attempt to “sabotage” hybrid sales and asked if I was influenced by “the makers of ever-increasing, gas-guzzling, air-polluting SUVs.”

Other readers said they adore their hybrids and have never experienced problems.

But there were almost as many e-mails reporting problems similar to the one reported in the earlier column. (The total is 20 e-mails: 11 praising Prius, and nine--eight Prius owners and one Honda Insight owner--reporting problems.

Reader Bob Walrath said he and his wife had the same battery-draining experience with their 2001 Prius and were told they weren’t driving enough to keep the battery charged.

Frustrated, Walrath told his dealer to keep the car until they had figured out the problem. “It took them almost a month,” he said. But the dealer did provide a free loaner and a sympathetic service manager, Walrath said.

“The trouble was with the auxiliary battery,” he said. The dealer ordered a new one and since then the Prius has been fine, he wrote.

Tom Wasnok, service manager at Norwalk Toyota, confirmed that he’s had to replace bad Prius starter batteries for two customers.

Reader Art Feldra wrote that the small starter battery in his Prius was dead the first time he went to his garage after buying the vehicle.

“The service rep at my Toyota dealer was on the ball,” Feldra wrote. He realized that it was the small starter battery that was the problem and replaced it.

One reader disputed Toyota spokesman Sam Butto’s Aug. 7 comment that the car should not lose a charge unless it has been idle for a couple of months.

Although he said he’s generally happy with his Prius, David Wong said he had two episodes in which the car would not start after sitting in the garage for two weeks.

He said a manager at the dealership informed him that the hybrid’s starter battery will discharge after sitting idle for about 10 days and suggested he disconnect the battery if the car would be left idle for a long period--the same advice Feldra received from his dealer.

Leanne Twidwell of Rancho Palos Verdes also experienced battery problems with her Prius and also was told at first that she wasn’t driving it enough.

But her dealer finally found that the battery was defective and ordered a new one, and the Prius has run properly ever since.

Twidwell wrote that it seems “some of these cars have a battery problem and either the dealers don’t know it, or aren’t looking for it in the right place. Too bad Toyota doesn’t put all the data together and let the service departments know about this.”

Indeed. Toyota did know there were problems with the small auxiliary starter batteries in some of its 2001 Prius models, according to spokesman John Hanson.

The auto maker said it was concerned that the battery was not strong enough and decided midway through the 2001 model year that a larger, higher-capacity battery was necessary and began installing them in the vehicles.

But Toyota did not issue service bulletins to alert dealers about the problem, nor did the company inform dealers that new models were getting larger batteries.

Hanson said he’s not surprised that dealerships didn’t know how to respond to the problem because “there was no official fix on it.”

Still, he characterized the number of complaints by Prius owners as so small that Toyota didn’t think it warranted notifying dealers and said the company still has no plans to do so. Toyota still views the situation as an isolated problem, Hanson said, because it was a “battery problem, not a systemic problem” with the vehicle. Most of the 2001 and all 2002 models should now have the larger auxiliary batteries, he said.

As for me, well, I appreciate the benefits hybrid cars offer for our environment.

But if there’s a defect in some of the vehicles’ batteries, it needs to be addressed, not dismissed. The better their reputation for reliability, the more hybrids we’ll see on the roads.

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Jeanne Wright cannot answer individual mail but responds to questions of general interest in this column. She can be reached at jeanrite @aol.com.