Do MORE reading on Prius Chat
Do MORE reading on Prius Chat to fact check Aaron's "fact check."
NOT a scam.
Battery packs that are not occasionally charged to the max and deep-discharged will have an increasing "memory effect" that greatly reduces the available charge. Reconditioning fixes that.
The issue is not "battery failure." Its loss of available charge. I'm dealing with this right now: 2011 Prius, 195k miles, supposedly 25% of battery charge possible, and a "bad battery" code. Yet NONE of the modules is bad. Nor is the charging circuitry faulty. The car simply can't perform its own reconditioning. That's not in the programming.
Battery reconditioning is quite similar to the process needed to regain better life on NiCd and even modern laptop batteries (although in that case you're reconditioning the built in smart battery charge parameters.)