One time when I was out in a shop, I encountered this really interesting issue with a Prius, much like this one.
It was towed in for a no-start, and it also had a couple of codes in there for the accelerator pedal having an issue.
The techs had already gone through and diagnosed the codes and repaired the problem with the accelerator, but the car still wouldn't start.
I was already there helping them out with something else and they came over and asked me, hey, is there some sort of reset or relearn or something we need to do to finish this job to make this car start so we can get it out of here?
I said, well, I'm not really sure. I haven't really worked on too many of these hybrid cars before. Let's just double check with your scanner.
We went in, checked for a couple of Functional Tests, and there wasn't anything therefore it so I said, well, while we're here, let's go into the troubleshooter and check and see if there's a tip on that. I'm going to walk you through what we did.
We were in the Engine system, so we went into engine and then we just popped right into troubleshooter.
We went to the engine troubleshooter and decided to look under symptom tips because I know they've got different types of tips in there, including Starting Problems.
Well I've got a problem start in the car, right, so we go in there and found a couple of different ones and this one caught my eye: Restart After Out Of Gas.
We went in there. It says: Hybrid vehicles may exhibit a no-ready light and it's a push-button start. So it needs a ready light to start if the customer drives the vehicle out of gas causing a no start condition after refuelling. It could store some various codes, but you will need to exit the troubleshooter and enter each of these modules in this order. Clear the codes in each, then attempt to start.
We have to go into the hybrid ECU first, then the hybrid battery, then the engine ECU and try to start the engine.
We said, well that's pretty quick, so exit out of the troubleshooter, go into the hybrid control system, hybrid ECU, clear codes and then go back into the battery, clear codes, and then back in the engine, clear codes. That was quick and wouldn't you know what the car started right up.
This kind of took place in and out-of-the way area, they were about an hour away from the nearest Toyota dealership and they were really close to putting it on the back of their flatbed tow truck, tying up their tow truck driver for a couple of hours to drive it back and forth, however long they would have spent at, the dealer plus however much the dealer would have charged them.
That little tip right there, just saved them a ton of time and a ton of money just by checking in that troubleshooter.
And that's in all the scan tools so it's definitely a good choice to check the troubleshooter when in doubt.