The 12 V battery saga yaris hybrid

[kilmarnock]

Does anyone know if there is a recall on the 12V Battery fitted to the Toyota Yaris hybrid 2022  My wife is so fed up of it not starting after a few days not running and every body that has one makes excuses for oh get a booster or a solar panel what a load of -----  In the past she has honda jazz s  no problem park for 3 weeks start first time i,m afraid hybrid is a step backwards in car ownership if you cant expect them to start

[FROSTYBALLS]

No - recalls in the UK are only for safety issues, and there are currently no service bulletins, etc 're the issue.

Toyota guidance rating back to 2020, is to use Ready mode for a period of time to charge the 12v - see the first post of 

 

Otherwise regular use, using a Battery charger to maintain the 12v, etc.

Toyota isn't the only manufacturer to have similar issues.

[Chas G]

1 hour ago, kilmarnock said:

Does anyone know if there is a recall on the 12V battery fitted to the Toyota Yaris hybrid 2022  My wife is so fed up of it not starting after a few days not running and every body that has one makes excuses for oh get a booster or a solar panel what a load of -----  In the past she has honda jazz s  no problem park for 3 weeks start first time i,m afraid hybrid is a step backwards in car ownership if you cant expect them to start

Could have been worse.....you could have bought a Lexus LBX.

Judging by the posts on the Lexus forum, the LBX suffers from exactly the same 12 volt Battery issues. 😀

Sorry to say but you have the choice of selling your Yaris or selecting one of the options to mitigate the problem which suits you circumstances eg garage, off street parking or parked on the public highway.

In my case, I have a garage so the temporary solution which suited me was fitting an accessible lead from the Battery under the back seat and plugging in to Ctek Battery charger every time I used the car.

[jthspace]

You could try an uprated Yuasa Battery - Yuasa YBX5202 - a straight swap with no downside and better quality than the cheap-as-chips Turkish Battery fitted as standard.

YUASA BATTERY - £53 mail order direct - £90+ Halfords

Many swear by it - myself included - and my Yaris was left for 21 days in July/August when I was in hospital and it started with no issues first time when I got home.  I also have a cheap Battery booster in case I ever got stuck - £35 Amazon (lots to choose from). I bought a cheaper one as I don't need one that is powerful enough to start a petrol engine - I just needed it to boot the computer in the Yaris.  It was originally for my Mitsubishi PHEV which would flatten its tiny 12v battery in a few days.  To be honest, I've never needed it for the Yaris.  Keep it under the passenger seat, if it's in the boot, you can't open it if the battery is flat.

[flash22]

get rid of a car because of a Battery............ Nah, deal with the problem in hand, buy it a new Battery job done move on in life, new cars are only covered for the first year

 

Also, make sure the car has had the DCM "customer satisfaction campaign" done

As I have said before lockdown killed off a lot of batteries they only need to go flat a few times for them to start degrading, it could be worse and you own a Ford/Fiat/anything French with a wet timing belt

[Chas G]

Have you had the car long?

[Cyker]

Mine's 3.5 years old, original Battery, still no issues!   

Clearly the solution is for you all to take your cars for a good hoon every weekend   

[Mojo1010]

As said the Battery requires changing into a yuasa, in time for the Scottish winter. Maybe have a read on the 12v thread at the top 🙂

[Yaris_Cross]

I will ask this here as i don't want to open another 12v thread.

When you use "ready mode" how do you know when the 12v Battery is fully charged, is there any way of seeing the charge  %  without adding aftermarket gadgets to the car?

[TonyHSD]

9 minutes ago, Yaris_Cross said:

I will ask this here as i don't want to open another 12v thread.

When you use "ready mode" how do you know when the 12v battery is fully charged, is there any way of seeing the charge  %  without adding aftermarket gadgets to the car?

No, you need a voltmeter or plug in charger to monitor Battery voltage. 
Usually the inverter is a fast charger and will recharge the 12v Battery in around 40-60 minutes.  

[Mojo1010]

Don't think so. One of these below can be use to get an 'idea' of voltage when turning on acc, need to be quick to read as voltage will drop due to powering up in ACC. 

[Yaris_Cross]

14 minutes ago, TonyHSD said:

Usually the inverter is a fast charger and will recharge the 12v battery in around 40-60 minutes.  

Is that from flat?

Worst case scenario -  If i were to use the car 5 days a week travelling 4 miles round trip every day  then a trip to a supermarket on the sixth day which is 8 miles away would sitting in ready mode for half an hour in the car park be enough to keep the 12v Battery happy?

[TonyHSD]

11 minutes ago, Yaris_Cross said:

Is that from flat?

Worst case scenario -  If i were to use the car 5 days a week travelling 4 miles round trip every day  then a trip to a supermarket on the sixth day which is 8 miles away would sitting in ready mode for half an hour in the car park be enough to keep the 12v battery happy?

I can’t say for sure as this will be different with the different condition of the batteries of different cars we have but pretty much this all you need 40-60 minutes in ready mode to rejuvenation a relatively low Battery. 
The time is important here, not the mileage. Even you can just stay stationary with car ON and the hybrid system will do its job. 
Another thing to note is that if the 12v Battery is dead even fully charged and passed test it will not be able to hold its charge and it will fail to start the car. 
Once Battery depleted and if this been done twice or more times the battery will not be good anymore and will need replacement. 

[Corolly Poly]

42 minutes ago, TonyHSD said:

I can’t say for sure as this will be different with the different condition of the batteries of different cars we have but pretty much this all you need 40-60 minutes in ready mode to rejuvenation a relatively low battery. 
The time is important here, not the mileage. Even you can just stay stationary with car ON and the hybrid system will do its job. 
Another thing to note is that if the 12v battery is dead even fully charged and passed test it will not be able to hold its charge and it will fail to start the car. 
Once battery depleted and if this been done twice or more times the battery will not be good anymore and will need replacement. 

Thanks. Have just written to dealer stating that the Battery life is unacceptable. I expect they will play the game of charging it for me before I get them to replace. I am in two minds about just sticking a higher capacity Yuasa in there but will wait to see if they find any sources of drainage first.

[Suzy100]

I used to have this problem in my old 2014 Yaris. Every so often, especially in cold weather, the car wouldn't start.  In the end I phoned my Green Flag recovery service who did various tests and said I needed to replace the Battery. When I phoned Toyota to arrange this, they didn't know when they would next have a suitable Battery because of shortages. Green Flag man suggested I phone a local company and buy an "aftermarket" Battery which he would replace the next day. No idea what an aftermarket battery is but it did the job. No problems for well over a year now. 

I'm in the process of buying a '22 Yaris excel. Hopefully I don't have the same problems all over again!

[hind]

2 hours ago, TonyHSD said:

Usually the inverter is a fast charger and will recharge the 12v battery in around 40-60 minutes.  

It's not that simple. The charging process is fast when the Battery is empty (it's voltage is low) as it can push more current without exceeding the maximum safe voltage of 14.4V. So after 1h it's definitely not fully charged. And if you start from "zero" (around 11V) and you assume that the Battery has it's nominal capacity of 35Ah, then you'll need to push constant 35 amps (A LOT of current for this size of the battery) during 1h period. The regular charging current is much smaller, old school of charging says 1/10 C (so for 35Ah it would be 3.5A and 10 hours of charging). 

This gets complicated as the DC/DC in Yaris is NOT charging the Battery to 100%. Sometimes after a ride the voltage drops, meaning that more current was taken from the battery then was put back into it. This is by design, probably to save some fuel, because I don't see any other reason to not charge the battery up to 14.4V all the time (maybe except conditions like rapid acceleration where you need ALL the power on the wheels). 

2 hours ago, Yaris_Cross said:

is there any way of seeing the charge  %  without adding aftermarket gadgets to the car?

No, and you have to understand what the State of Charge (SoC) of the battery is. It's the percentage value, and cana be measured by checking the voltage after 30 minutes of inactivity. But just the SoC doesn't tell us anything, because it's not the SoC that powers the car when it's parked, but the capacity. You ever had a phone which had 100% of the battery and can withstand 2 days of usage, but a few years later the same phone with the same battery and the same 100% charge can barely hold till the end of the day? This is the same. The phone had lost it's battery capacity.

So how do you measure capacity? 

There is no simple way other than charging the battery to full with a charger, then discharging it down to 11V measuring the amps-hours taken from the battery. This is your effective capacity. You can charge it and measure the amp-hours pushed into the battery, this value should be a little bit higher than the actual capacity, but can be used for approximation without the need to discharge the battery. 

This takes time. Hours, as you can see, because of the way the lead-acid battery chemistry works. So no battery shop, dealership or other workshop can measure the capacity just by doing a few seconds of test. 

You can check the voltage in a brief moment between pushing the start button / rotating the key to the ignition and the DC/DC converter kicking in and increasing the voltage in a car, but it's again not a voltage of the battery, but rather the voltage of the battery which is loaded with lighting bulbs, screens and everything which is working when you enter the car. Yet it can tell you more or less the current condition of the battery (it's voltage with load), but never the capacity, unfortunately.

[Yaris_Cross]

So the bottom line is if you do not spend much time in the car driving best to keep the car in Ready mode whenever you can and for as long as you can and keep a fully charged booster in the glove box just in case.

[Yaris_Cross]

I remember one member used a bluetooth monitor but i haven't seen one mentioned in ages would it do the job?

 

 

[Yaris_Cross]

Could someone explain why this doesn't happen when you install the box directly to the + and - terminal

 

 

[hind]

If you drive regularly but short distances, it's a nice feature which can tell you when you need to recharge the car because the voltage is dangerously low. But if you leave the car for a more than a week (holiday trip for example) then it will not help you as you need to be near the car to read the voltage. 

[hind]

1 minute ago, Yaris_Cross said:

Could someone explain why this doesn't happen when you install the box - 

In short words - the box has higher resistance than the bare wire 😉 

[Yaris_Cross]

Ready mode shown here (wait for second test result)

 

 

[MikeSh]

Unfortunately charging systems, alternator or dc-dc converters, are not as dumb as they used to be. 

Our other car has a 'traditional' alternator and I have a voltage monitor plugged into the aux socket (that's another story) and it's clear that it does not just whack voltage at the 12V Battery. After starting the car it takes a significant time before ramping up the voltage, presumably while it assesses the charge level. Periodically I use a smart charger to give the Battery a boost as the car is mainly used for short trips and I've noticed that after this the system doesn't even try to charge the Battery to any extent, usually supplying a fairly low voltage. I think that it doesn't want to overcharge the battery and so aims for a less than 100% charge. The smart charger leaves the battery at about 12.6V, after resting, but the car seems to want it at 12.2-12.3. Which probably makes sense. I suspect that the dc-dc used in hybrids and EVs may have similar programmes. 

So don't assume that there is some magic number you should be seeing on any display. Batteries are verging on weird science.

[hind]

8 hours ago, MikeSh said:

the car seems to want it at 12.2-12.3. Which probably makes sense

Which also kills the Battery when the car is left parked for 2+ weeks 😅 

[MikeSh]

33 minutes ago, hind said:

Which also kills the battery when the car is left parked for 2+ weeks 😅 

That car has an EFB Battery, for start/stop, so the voltage profile may be a little different.

The problem with it seems to be short journeys - like most modern cars - as the 'next day' voltage at first turn on tends to fall over a few weeks from 12.2 to 11.9. It seems to charge from the alternator okay as once it's been running for a few seconds the voltage goes up to 14+. And if it gets a longer run of a couple of hours the next day volts will be back at 12.2-12.3 again. So I now give it a boost charge when it gets below 12 at turn on.