Drive or Reverse not working

I leased Rav4 EV 11 months ago, and has 18,500 miles. I charge daily (scheduled timer mostly) rarely use extended charge, on Friday last week, there was 40 miles left, tried immediate charging mode, after an hour received charging interruption notification mail even though charge connector was still plugged in, GOM showed battery was charged around 60% (10 bars), and range as 158 miles. After that cannot drive my EV, "Drive" and "Reverse" does not work, and also could not charge again. "Parking" and "Neutral" mode works. After few tries of pressing Start/Stop, and Plugging out and Plugging back charge connector, batter indicator dropped to 0% charge, and range to drive still shows 158 miles. Car has to be towed to dealer for repair, they are yet to diagnose the problem, and expect it may take upto a week (will have an update next week), and provided a loaner ICE.

Questions:

1. Has anyone encountered this problem, please share your experience

2. Dealer provided an ICE as a loaner, instead of electric car - my commute is 80 miles a day, with ICE have to spend 2 to 3 gallons of gas/day. Dealer indicates, they only provide ICE, small size car's through rental company (in this case, enterprise rent a car). Please share your experience on loaner vehicles provided by your dealer when EV was/is at their shop for extended time during warranty period, Does Toyota not provide Rav4 loaners vehicles?.

Thanks

Sorry you are having problems . . .

The problem your having is actually fairly common. There are other threads here with countless comments about it. I won't repeat my own experience here other than to say, you did the right thing taking your car to the dealer to sort out the problem. You can expect the dealer to either reflash your computer's firmware or replace it entirely. Mine was replaced but it took several weeks to order. In the meantime, I kept driving my RAV4 EV since the problem was only temporary, but still quite worrisome nevertheless. Of course, the computer replacement was covered under warranty.

Unfortunatley, I don't feel replacing the computer guarantees the same problem will not eventually reoccur. I believe in a few cases of other owners, it DID happen again!

Like Dsinned, I'm also sorry that this happened to you.

Did your car display any sort of error message (like Check EV system or similar) and did the dealer recover any stored error codes? It would be useful to report the specific code(s) to see who on the forum has had the same specific problem and how it was resolved.

Good luck, and please keep us posted.

thanks Dsinned, and tgreene

I did not see any error code on the display. Sure, i will check if they recovered any error codes and post back. Thanks,

Dsinned said:

The problem your having is actually fairly common. There are other threads here with countless comments about it.

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Hmmm I dunno... If you're referring to the 'Check EV System' problem this sounds different, as there were no visible error messages and the car was completely undrivable. If I had to guess I'd say it's a cell failure in the battery, in which case you're probably in luck as that would mean getting a new battery, which is like getting a brand new car almost 20k miles in. Or it could just be some computer glitch that you might've cleared on your own by doing a "hard reboot" of the system (i.e. disconnect the 12v battery for a few minutes, don't just hit the power button.)

In either case, I know it sucks being without your Rav and being stuck in a gas guzzler, but in my experience that's the norm. I do know of a few people who got EV loaners, but at my dealer it's usually a Corolla. You could try calling around to other Toyota dealers and demand that they tow your car to one that will give you an EV loaner. Hopefully whatever the issue they get it fixed quick.

still at the dealer, they indicated updating firmware fails and are waiting for engineers from Tesla.

Great feeling to get the EV back. fooljoe was right, it was a cell failure, replaced with new battery.

sharinath said:

Great feeling to get the EV back. fooljoe was right, it was a cell failure, replaced with new battery.

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Wow thats kind of good news for you. Is this the result most people are getting when they have this issue?

Reading these posts really scares the crap out of me. I want to buy a used rav EV and ship it to use here in central NY. If something happens I really worry a local dealer wont be able to fix it.

Congrats on getting the Rav back with a brand new battery!

jimbo69ny said:

Wow thats kind of good news for you. Is this the result most people are getting when they have this issue?

Reading these posts really scares the crap out of me. I want to buy a used rav EV and ship it to use here in central NY. If something happens I really worry a local dealer wont be able to fix it.

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Requiring a battery replacement is very rare. This is the first I've heard of for sure, although I vaguely recall perhaps one other. There was another issue brought up in this thread where the "Check EV System" light came on with some other weird behavior, which was fairly common, but was just a software fix.

As far as your trepidation about taking a Rav out of state, as long as a local dealer agrees to service it you should be fine. No Toyota dealer - whether in California or not - knows anything substantial about the inner workings of our cars; that's all Tesla. When something fails the Toyota mechanics just have to wait for a replacement unit from Tesla and do the relatively simple job of bolting in the new unit, which any mechanic who can follow instructions from a service manual should be able to do.