Gen 3 Prius Hybrid System Indicator Cloudy/Blurry when night lights are on

[adiminca]

Can anybody give me a hint about this strange issue? In my 2012 Prius the hybris system indicator display is a little bit blurry and when I turn on headlights it becomes almost unreadable, it becomes kinda smeared, with many thin horizontal light lines. The darker I set the display, the bigger this parasite lights shines. I have 2 photos, first with the display still readable when the lights are off and second, when I turn on the lights and all the display becomes a big light blob.

 

[Anthony Poli]

On 12/13/2019 at 3:35 PM, adiminca said:

Can anybody give me a hint about this strange issue? In my 2012 Prius the hybris system indicator display is a little bit blurry and when I turn on headlights it becomes almost unreadable, it becomes kinda smeared, with many thin horizontal light lines. The darker I set the display, the bigger this parasite lights shines. I have 2 photos, first with the display still readable when the lights are off and second, when I turn on the lights and all the display becomes a big light blob.
 

Looks like your display is faulty, is the car still under warranty?

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

 

[adiminca]

No, I bought used this august, checked at the local Toyota, they said it's out of warranty. I was hoping I might fix it myself if it's something like a bad solder or similar, I just don't know to well how those vacuum tube displays work.

[QuantumFireball]

Maybe check for loose connections? I'm not sure how easy it is to disassemble though. A bit of "percussive maintenance"? :)

[adiminca]

Already tried it. I slapped it pretty hard in different points- no luck at all. My guess is it is a degraded capacitor since the symptom looks as it has not enough voltage, thus leading to those ghost lines, as it hasn't enough contrast. But I was hoping somebody had the same problem and identified the culprit so i could go right to the spot, I don't have a garage so it is very dificult for me to tear all the front of the car apart and check everything in there.

[QuantumFireball]

It seems to be a fairly common issue for part of the instrument cluster to fail on the Gen 2 in the US due to either a bad cap or solder joint (I forget which), but I haven't heard of such issues with the Gen 3.

[Joseph D]

I don't think you can draw any correlation between the Gen 2 CM (combination meter) failure and what this poster is reporting with the Gen 3 fluorescent display.

[QuantumFireball]

They're both vacuum fluorescent displays, just one has fixed segments whereas the other is a dot matrix display. Though the way the display is generated for the latter is much more complex.