No. Your report is the first time I have heard of it.

You do have some odd things happening. If I recall I have previously suggested it may be a problem with your 12 volt battery and 12 volt system, and not necessarily the 245 volt hybrid battery system.

Your heater fan would operate on 12 volts, and I am quite sure the 12 volt system powers up the dash instrumentation in general.

Have you checked your 12 volt battery voltage at various times. Here is what I got when my 2012 was new:

Turned on: 14.63 volts
Just turned off: 13.23 volts
After 20 minutes off: 12.93 volts
Off overnight: 12.92 volts
After 2 weeks of non use: 12.53 volts

Is this the original 12 volt Toyota battery? While I have not heard of the issue of leaving the fan on high, I have heard of a number of owners having to replace their 12 volt battery.

A digital voltmeter (multimeter) in an invaluable tool in monitoring the electrical system in a car. They only cost $15-20 or so.

 

When I had my 2007 TCH I drove it for 5 years up to 38,000 miles when I traded it for the '12 TCH. I did keep a eye on the 12 volt battery in the '07. I remember with the engine running it was up similar to Ron's battery reading.

If I let it sit overnight, the next evening it would read 11.5 volts. Evidently the 12 volt battery was getting soft after 5 years. The car actually started right up just like when it was new so I wasn't that worried about it failing at the time.

The dealer went though the car and sold it the very next day as a certified car with lots of warranty. I never did ask the tech that went over it if they replace the 12 volt battery.

I understand the 12 volt battery is charged from the traction battery. I also know any fan in the car on full-blast will sure pull lots of amps from the 12 volt battery. Others like in the '12 TCH with lots of current drain would be the heated seats or the rear defroster.

 

Also in Canada the headlights come on automatically at start up. It is hard to imagine that the 12 volt system if it is operating properly should not handle a fan at high speed.

 

Hi All,

Here is the latest in the hybrid battery draining problem.
Quick recap....about 8 months ago I began to notice that the hybrid battery would be in the green on the nav display that shows the system hybrid battery level, and I would turn the car off, sometimes for only 15 minutes or so, and come back to find the hybrid battery in the purple - usually one bar.
This was irregular but happened at least twice a month for 3 months or so. I brought it to my dealer at around 95,000 miles, still under hybrid system warranty, and they tested it and said the hybrid battery was good. I was not getting hybrid system dash errors so the onboard computer was not seeing a problem.
A month or two later, I had an experience where the car seemed stalled when I pulled out into the road, and it took several seconds before the car moved....and for about a week after that the hybrid battery NEVER ONCE charged up to the green bars. It would vary from purple to blue only. I was about to bring it to the dealer when this stopped and it DID start to go back into the green.
Another month or so later, and just over 100,000 miles, my wife drives the car and about 30 minutes from home the dashboard lights up like a Christmas tree and she sees "hybrid system failure" flash on the panel. She too is in the midst of pulling out into traffic and almost gets hit by an oncoming car because the Camry will not move for several seconds! She brings it to the Toyota dealer and they keep it for 4 hours and return it, indicating it was just a computer malfunction???? They had reset the computer andsaid that they thought the problem was caused by having the cabin heater on high when starting the car.
We drive the car for a week and all is well. Then one day the dashboard lights up again, flashing "hybrid system failure". We take it to the Toyota dealer and demand they fix it....at this point the car is dangerous to drive. You simply can;t tell if it is going to move when you press the gas pedal or fail to move and leave you stuck like a dead weight!
The dealer checks the car again and my wife (who was driving it at the time and brought it to the dealer) demands the problem be fixed...she will not risk her life on an intermittent problem.
The dealer takes the car and gives my wife a corolla rental car (no charge). He says he will replace the hybrid battery because we brought the car in well within the warranty period for this hybrid battery problem...even though they did not catch it.
A week later we get our Camry back with an invoice that says:

REPLACED HYBRID BATTERY UNDER TOYOTA GOODWILL.....

No charge for the rental car or for the hybrid battery replacement.
We just got the Camry back today, and so far it looks good. We'll let everyone know how things go!
I must say that we are thankful that Toyota (and our Toyota dealer) did the right thing. They asked us to call them if we see any further problems.
If everything runs well and we no longer see any problems, I will certainly give this dealer my continuing business.

 

Scott,

Glad to see the problem was fixed and I think that you are the first to have a Camry Hybrid traction battery failure on this board. A dubious honor at best but at least it was replaced at no cost to you. Let us know how everything works out in the future.

 

Thanks for posting your experience. It will be interesting to know what they exactly replace. Just the HV battery, or more?

What I found strange about your symptoms was the intermittent nature of the problem. It didn't seem possible that a battery could go from fully charged to nothing, and then back to charged again rapidly. That was what was making me think it was an indication problem, and not an actual battery problem. Almost seems as if there is an intermittent short in the battery.

Did you ask for a copy of the battery test report? It also would be interesting to see. Typically only one cell fails, not the battery in general.

 

With so many cells hooked together in series to make up the 245 dc volts. I'm thinking more that it could have been a resistive connection inside the traction battery. The only traction battery problems I can remember were a few weak cells on the two Prius that had over 240K on the clock.

This particular Camry with around 100K may not have been a cell problem in this case. I have seen intermittent connections, but not a internal intermittent NiCad or NiMh cell in any rechargeable batteries that I can remember, although it could happen.

I hope that Toyota plans to test this traction battery pack and find exactly what was causing the intermittent failure. Toyota may do that exact thing to eliminate any future such failures as this.

I'm relieved as you are that the problems seems to be fixed.

 

After driving the car now for a few days, perhaps 150 miles or so, I have noticed something very odd.
The Energy Monitor display of the NAV system only shows either 6 bars (blue) or 7 bars (green). Never any fewer than 6 bars and never all 8 bars.
How can that be? I tried driving on a back road for over 15 minutes JUST USING THE BATTERY POWER and the display and corresponding gauge in the window above the steering wheel never went below the 6 bar level. Worse still, it seems that after driving it on hybrid battery for that length of time, the engine kicked on at the end, even though I remained continually under 40 MPH, which is what the car used to do when the hybrid battery drained all the way to the purple 1 or 2 bar level and the car switched from battery to engine power even though the driving speed and level of road hadn't changed.
The dealer mentioned something at one point about "updating" the software to fix our hybrid issues, but we pointed out that the battery was the issue and not just the software in the car. It seems like the software was updated, I noticed that the DVD for the guidance system had been removed and replaced because the car nav system was set to a zone in a different part of the country when we got the car back.
I can't imagine that having a new battery would cause the energy monitor to show only a 2 bar change in charge no matter how little or much the hybrid batter was being used. The software might have been changed as well...since it seems to no longer reflect the actual battery charge level.
Also, our MPG average has gone down about 4 or 5 MPG compared to what it used to be. That's just in about 150 miles...not a huge amount of driving.
But I am perplexed that the hybrid battery charge level on the energy monitor never changes by more than 2 bars. Anyone else ever seen such a thing? Is this what should be expected with a new battery?

Thanks

 

At the top end of the battery charge display mine almost never goes above 6 bars, and I have never see it at the full 8 bars. It is not supposed to charge that high because over charging is bad for the battery, and also if there is no room in the battery to accept charge and you go down a hill or slow down there is no place for the energy to go, so you waste it.

However at the other end I can easily take the battery down to two purple bars. Not sure if I have ever seen it at one bar. So that behaviour of not going below 6 bars seems wrong.

My recollection of your issues before suggested your display was not acting normal. Perhaps it is still not normal.

 

Not exactly correct. The rapid discharge of the battery was an indication of a failing hybrid battery, not of a bad display. That was proven when we started getting all the hybrid system failures and the dealer finally recognized that the battery needed to be replaced. So the display was never the problem. It was showing an indication of a soon to fail battery...that is, a battery that was already intermittently failing but not often enough to be caught by the dealer.
Now, however, the display is NOT reflecting the actual state of battery charge level and I suspect that this is because of a software update to the hybrid system software. So far, the battery charge level has never gone down below 6 bars on the energy monitor display. But the car behaves as if the battery IS discharging all the way down to the purple bars and then kicking in the gas engine when the battery can no longer provide the power to drive the car.
We will drive the car for another week or so and talk to the dealer if the status doesn't change. At this point, the energy monitor nav display is obviously showing incorrect data. In its current state, I would never see the signs I saw before that indicated that my battery was soon to fail....i.e. the display going from a nearly full charge to a nearly empty (purple) display when the car is shut off in a matter of minutes.
We'll see how things go the next few days.