Here’s Why Hybrid Cars Suck

rev up your engines okay we gotta use prius here the guy bought it for eight grand with about 87 000 miles now he's got over 140 so he's gotten 50 something thousand miles out of it so far and he hasn't had any real problems other than now it jolts when it turns the engine back on from running from the electric motor and battery and it idles a little shake he parked under a tree at an airbnb so be wary of airbnbs that have birds that crap in them still got the original battery in it and he notices his mileage is a little down from what it used to be because obviously the battery is worn since it's got 141 000 miles on it's now 13 years old but it was made in japan now he rented a new corolla that was made in mississippi the other day and he said it was nothing to this car made mississippi versus made japan there is a difference don't let people bs you that they're all the same they are not the advantage of a japanese car is it was not just built in japan motors and battery pack and all that stuff but it was put together by japanese and there is a difference you haven't seen my video that i made the other day about the guy who used to work for toyota who had a 2017 toyota tacoma and the white paint was coming off of it put together and painted in mexico and they did a lousy job painting and the paint was coming off of it so there is a difference you get it made in japan vehicle it's going to be better quality there's nowhere fans or butts oh he's smart he changes the oil every seven to ten thousand miles with full synthetic oil so he doesn't have any head gasket problems in the regular gasoline engine he's an uber driver now these things actually make a lot of sense for an uber driver when i go to seattle and do internet business stuff there invariably i'm riding around in prius ubers they all have them because so much better gas mileage stop and go that's what these things are made for they're not made for highway cruising because they're not using the electrical portion of hardly at all except when you accelerate they're made for stop and go traffic it makes sense you actually make much more money on an uber you're spending a lot less money on gasoline okay average is about 50 miles a gallon in the city imagine this scenario i've seen guys driving uber with a suburban in town that thing gets less than 10 miles a gallon so this thing gets five times better gas mileage and that certainly hits the bottom line if you're gonna be an uber driver so as far as it stands for him he's making good money on the deal because he only paid 8 000 for a car considering that this car was 25 grand to start off with he got it for eight and that included taxes and everything he said so that was a good deal 50 000 something miles on it hasn't put any real money into the thing he's coming out pretty good but always be warned they're very complex cars this thing's having a clunky stally issue so let's get out the big computer now we're getting ready here's a bit of humor irony too electric hybrid prius right but it's got a hand seat that you gotta pull a lever on we'll turn the idiot lights on intelligent diagnosis and while we're waiting for the machine to do its job realize you can't work on one of these priuses without a fancy computer like this i mean you can change spark plugs brake pads crap like that but diagnosis you got to have a machine like this because look at all the stuff going through all these different modules everything's green or gray gray just means it's not equipped so there's no kinds of codes or anything so we'll go into the main computer system now realize that this car is no different than any other in terms of the computer setup if data is plus or minus 20 it's going to trip a trouble code there's no trouble codes because the problem is less than 20 humans can feel things that the computer doesn't care about mainly because the computer's programmed that way if they program the computers to do one or two or three percent your check engine light would be coming on all the time and that's one of the reasons that it's set up the way that it is so if you ever go to a mechanic and they say well the check engine light's not on there's no trouble codes well we can't find out what's wrong go to another mechanic that's not where you end that's only where you begin so we'll look at some of the special functions we can do yeah there's nothing there that we need to mess with we'll look at the actuator test that we can do if necessary we can do all these tests but it would be wild guessing to start there so instead we'll go back to the data stream we selected them all and guess what it's time for a road trip we'll record what's happening see when it acts up then we'll analyze the data and off we go it's running on the battery now let's give it some gas there goes the engine we'll give it a good road test there'll be a lot of the ground these things do handle quite well the main reason to low to the ground though is because then they have less coefficient of drag and they're more efficient that's how it can get 50 miles a gallon driving around in stop and go traffic okay now the engine's shut off we're gonna see what happens when we take off [Music] it kicked in and it wasn't too bad it didn't clunk yet that's just normal okay now it's off so we're gonna put the ac on and we'll sit here until it turns itself back on it can only run so long with the ac on without turning itself on here we go it really wasn't that bad a little jiggle but not much it kicked in it didn't really jiggle a lot of people poo poo the prius as they say ah they're so slow they don't get out of their own way but that's not exactly the truth here we're stopped with the engines not on let's floor it and see what happens you can see it's not that slow when you have the electric motor and the gasoline motor combining it's got a reasonable amount of torque and if you're just cruising down the road you get a battery boost when you floor it see it's not all that bad now the computer hasn't found any real faults and so far electronically i haven't either it hasn't really done that much of a jiggle so let's go back and look at the physical mechanical parts you can see with the edge that it has on it the battery isn't charging up all that much you can see the battery has a very low charge even though it's being driven around the lower the battery the harder it's going to be for the thing to restart itself when it shuts off and turns itself back on again now i notice i'm braking a lot and the battery is charging up better here you can see it's starting to get higher but with its age it's discharging the battery a lot faster than it would with a newer vehicle because the battery's losing its level of efficiency that's what happens with these hybrid cars they get to be older like this and basically it's a 12 year old car that the batteries will not hold the charge as long they'll discharge faster okay so we come to a stop it's got a higher level of charge now see if we get a little bump out of it we'll go up a hill they don't like going uphill of course they're going to turn the motor on pretty quick [Music] well that was a completely seamless transition i didn't feel you bump it off realize it's got a regular motor too and it has motor mounts could be a motor mounted transmission mount starting to get a little weak in the trunk there's a small battery we're gonna test that first and there it is the little bitty battery we're going to test this now this is a 410 cold cranking battery so we're going to test it with our little battery tester let's see what the little machine is going to say in vehicle we want battery test it's a regular flooding called cranking amps and it's 450 so we'll go down and here we go replace battery it's only got 342 left now you might think oh it's got the gigantic huge batteries that's under there but they also have a regular lead acid battery in these things this one even though it's only a year old it's shocked now he's an uber driver i see some of these things the batteries get low because they don't use them enough and that's the auxiliary battery it just shows those tiny little batteries they aren't that well made and a lot of this problem can because of that because when it's starting a vehicle over could easily be that it needs to be replaced anyways because it's too low there's so much relationship in this car the generator puts out all kinds of power it's got to be stepped down to some voltage step up to some voltage and of course that little one is only a 12 volt battery there's so much complexity in this thing when you do test that if it says replace battery replace that first that could fix all your problems but we're going to test the motor mounts just in case i'll go under the car as we check we see the cars going up in the air the car's going up in here so is the motor and transmission the body would stay down and the motor go up in the air that's not the case so there's nothing wrong with the mounts we'll analyze the data anyways as long as you took a road test so go to sync file here and we'll go to toyota prius it's all going to be hiding in there it'll be the first one that we did with all that data and we can play it back so we're going to look for odd data luckily it's color-coded if there's something really wrong it'll be in the red look at stuff in a graphic analysis no bad data coming out there no glitches here we did miss anything we'll go through all 15 pages of data eight seven six five four three two one and everything's still blue so there's no bad data at all now interestingly enough his mother has an older prius an o5 which just had the main battery replaced with the remanufactured one i'm not that big of a fan but he says hers doesn't jiggle at all that works perfectly well she's got a fully charged hybrid battery i don't know about the other battery it's not here so i can't test it now we know his hybrid battery is worn the age the mileage that could be part of it but since the auxiliary battery says it should be replaced from the testing machine he's going to replace it and see if it helps with the jiggling but my advice is if it doesn't help with the jiggling live with the jiggling cause eventually you'd have to replace that giant battery and then he doesn't know if he wants to spend that kind of money or just go get another newer used prius sometimes it's cheaper buying a car than it is buying a battery in these things well i just got done talking to toyota and they do sell brand new ones and they come down some what hearts and labor the battery without taxes like 3 500 bucks it is a new battery it's not a remanufactured one but by the time you're done you're gonna pay close to five grand and considering that he paid eight grand for the whole car and now it's getting higher mileage he'd probably better putting that money into another used prius that has less miles it has 80 000 miles or something and then go from there but of course all that's debatable now because he might be able to buy that little battery and that could solve the whole thing if it stops doing it great if not the big giant battery and he's still getting 50 miles a gallon in town what the heck i just drive it got a little jiggle to it personally i have a lot of customers with these that they really jerk when they turn the engine back on and the people have lived with it and five years later it still does the jerk when it turns the engine back on but they still hit 50 miles a gallon so who cares so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos remember to ring that bell [Music] you

Channel: Scotty Kilmer

Views: 870,467

Keywords: auto, auto repair, car, car diy, car repair, cars, diy, how to, mechanic, repair, scotty kilmer, car review, buying a car, car advice, car buying, luxury car, buying a hybrid car, buying a hybrid, buying a new hybrid car, buying a used hybrid car, buying a used hybrid, don't buy hybrid cars, hybrid, hybrid car, hybrid cars, watch this before buying a hybrid car, hybrid car review, hybrid car repair, hybrid car reliability, should i buy a hybrid car, why not to buy a hybrid car

Id: cuu4ekgq_xI

Length: 11min 35sec (695 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 15 2021