A friend of mine drives a 2010 RX450h and the dealer said the battery should be replaced, the quote is around 7 grand, and that's a no no.

What are the options? Is there any way to replace the bad cells?

Thanks.

 

There are companies that rebuild the battery pack for far cheaper than that. Do a search on Hybrid Battery remanufacturing.

 

Is your friend having issues with the hybrid battery? Has your friend tried various apps (Dr Prius is one) that may help diagnose the issue?

 

So today I took the car and I checked it with Techstream and here you can see the numbers:












The code was P0A80. After the reset I drove the car for 20 miles and everything looks normal.

Do you or anybody else see anything suspicious here? I would like to see those numbers from a non problem car. Thanks.

 

I took it apart, cleaned all the contacts and it works much much better. I will drive the car tomorrow so I will keep you posted.

 

Neat. I've seen videos on Youtube doing battery disassembly on Prius batteries, and I recall at one point it was mentioned that corroded contacts often cause battery faults. Apparently you can even buy 3rd party contacts to replace instead of trying to clean them. For Toyota, I guess they want nothing to do with people messing with their batteries so the official story is always replace the entire thing even if a few bucks and a bit of TLC can often fix issues.